Misery Lit Debunked

Is this the end for the misery memoir ? Will there be an expanding genre of books written debunking fictitious misery memoirs?

Several bestselling mis lit books (painful lives, tragic life stories, inspirational memoirs, euphemise the whole vicarious paedo-erotica/vicarious child abuse genre as you wish) have turned out to be fictional. If you haven't the time to read a whole book, you can read bite-sized mis lit tales in the various indistinguishable real-life story magazines. If you can't read (what are you doing reading this then?) you can watch misery in action on TV talkshows. Life can be miserable enough (the hard-to-believe Austrian incest/cellar case), but the audience's thirst for salacious stories of violent parents and raped children has led to a mis lit industry where fiction masquerades as real life survival of some (wholly imaginary) dire childhood.

An early mis lit book was The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk in 1836. Then we had the Three Faces of Eve (1957), When Rabbit Howls (1988), both of which fed on the public's fascination for multiple personality disorder; When Rabbit Howls also documented a childhood of abuse by the stepfather. Childhood memoirs are nothing new, but sexual/physical abuse wasn't always a compulsory element. Winifred Foley's series (published 1974 onwards) about growing up in the Forest of Dean documents a struggle against poverty, but in a supportive family and community.
Although morbid memoirs have existed for over a century, the modern mis lit standard was set in Angela's Ashes (1996). It was refined into the modern form in 2000 by Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It (followed by sequels, spin-offs, motivational talks and his brother's series of books, making it a family industry) about an abusive alcoholic mother who starved and beat one of her children and force-fed him ammonia. From then on, it went into a downward spiral of "more miserable than thou". Damaged (Cathy Glass) is the story of a foster mother and her horribly abused seven-year-old foster child. Please, Daddy, No (Stuart Howarth) is about a boy repeatedly raped by his father, forced to eat pigswill, abused by paedophiles and becoming a homeless, arsonist cocaine-addict jailed after killing the abusive father. Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood (Julie Gregory) is about a child damaged by her mother's Munchausen's by proxy. How much grimmer can it get? The simple answer is as grim as human imagination can make them! Misery sells. More misery sells more books.

I just don't buy the idea that people buy these books for information or advice, for an 'Open Sesame' to becoming free of their own harrowing memories.... Rather they show that, as a nation, we seem utterly in thrall to paedophilia We are obsessed with it. And now, with these books, we are wallowing in the muck of it. It's all rather disgusting.

...these books are popular because they flatter readers' sense of moral outrage while also secretly titillating. "Paedophiles are down there with the Nazis and Judas as all-time bad folk ... we feel edified and also morbidly thrilled.

And more criticism of a fantasised genre here and here

... has led to the production of wilder, more outlandish and more wrenching stories ... the young woman who worked in a brothel for ten years to support her heroin habit ... the young boy physically and emotionally abused by his mother ... the one about the little girl who spent a childhood being raped by her father. ... the book world’s biggest boom sector.

Of the top 100 best selling paperbacks of 2006 in the UK, eleven were misery memoirs ... the top selling misery memoir (Behind Closed Doors, by Jenny Tomlin) sold more than six times the number sold by that year’s Booker Prize winner (Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss).

... This trend is disturbing for two reasons. First, these lurid stories encourage an unhealthy voyeurism, allowing readers to revel in the misfortunes of others and perhaps, in extreme cases, even normalising child abuse and paedophilia. Second, because market demand is high, more and more people are churning out these chilling tales of abasement, even when they are not true.

Writers have realised that mis lit is a road to publishing success. Many have succumbed to the temptation to elaborate on or even completely fabricate large swaths of “the truth”. In the US, Norma Khouri’s story of an honour killing and James Frey’s harrowing tale of his years as a drug addicted criminal have been shown to be largely works of fiction. Relatives of Constance Briscoe have discredited much of the childhood misery she wrote about. There are no records or witnesses to verify that Kathy O’Beirne, who wrote a memoir of life inside Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, ever lived there. Most recently, there are discrepancies in Ismael Beah’s account of child soldiering in Sierra Leone.

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed - Maria Monk (1836)

The Sisters of Charity in Montreal get raped by priests and the resulting babies are baptised then strangled. Monk was a prostitute who had spent time in a Magdalene Laundry (so had some experience of strict nuns), but her salacious/tragic tale was the result of an inability to tell fantasy from reality due to a childhood brain injury. The book is currently in reprint, riding high on the wave of mis lit.

Don't Ever Tell (aka Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries) - Kathy O'Beirne (2005)

An unremitting tale of misery about growing up in 1960s Ireland. Kathy wrote of being tortured by dad, experimented on in a psych hospital and raped by priests before virtual slavery at one of the harsh Magdalene laundries for fallen women where 14 year old Kathy bore a daughter. Except the nuns, however harsh, kept detailed records and did not admit pregnant women or 13 year old girls. Kathy never was in a Magdalene laundry, there was no daughter who died aged 10 and the whole thing was fantasy inspired by a film about the harshness of the nuns and their laundries. Her birth certificate and school records show O'Beirne's book lies about her age, education and alleged adoption.

Ugly / Beyond Ugly - Constance Briscoe

Relatives of Constance Briscoe have cast doubt on some of the childhood misery she wrote about. It's not just defensiveness, distorting the truth to make it more tragic sells more copies.

Surviving With Wolves; The most extraordinary story of World War II - Misha Defonseca (2005)

Six-year-old Belgian Jewish girl searching for missing reistance fighter parents treks 1900-miles around occupied Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy across the Alps to France then back to Belgium, kills a Nazi officer and is sheltered by packs of wolves. The writer's real name is Monique De Wael, she isn't Jewish and the whole book is fiction. This fiction pretending to be real life is an insult to the experiences of those who did survive against the odds during WWII.

Love and Consequences - Margaret B Jones (2008)

A story about growing up half-white, half-native American in the ghettos and gangland of Los Angeles and selling drugs at the age of eight. The author's real name is Margaret Seltzer and the experiences were fictionalised versions of friends' experiences. This fake was withdrawn from USAnian bookshops.

Fragments: Memories Of A Wartime Childhood - Binjamin Wilkomirski (1997)

Supposedly the harrowing "recovered memories" account of life in Auschwitz. The author's real name is Bruno Doesseker, he spent his wartime childhood in Switzerland and only went to Auschwitz on a tourist bus. Publicly denounced by his ex-girlfriend. When fiction claims to be fact, it insults the real survivors of the camps. Such a story might have found an audience as educational fiction, but by marketing it as a real mis lit memoir it jumps on the painful lives bandwagon and the greater sales from that marketing genre.

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey (2003)

Account of a drug-addicted criminal who spent three atrocious months in jail where he encountered all manner of horrors including substance abuse and a lecherous priest. The author based the fiction on his couple of hours in a cell.


There is no doubt about it, mis lit is a bandwagon:

- when truth is insufficient, fiction provides consumers with their fix of child abuse, wife-bashing and sexual titillation.
- it gets away with detailing paedophilia and incest, topics banned from erotic fiction, for those titillated by it (however much they deny it titillates them)
- it assures authors greater sales than the fiction or ordinary (auto)biography sections
- readers seem to need stronger and stronger fixes/authors need more and more morbid tales to be competitive hence the books are becoming more and more extreme
- readers thirst for specific topics; priests/nuns/orphans and paedophilia/incest are especially popular sub-genre and writers are happy to oblige

An increasing amount of mis lit is money-making titillation masquerading as "inspirational" or "a survivor's story" and is read by those too shy to head for the erotica section or whose erotic interests are not catered for by legally available erotica. They justify their salacious interest in child erotica/abuse by expressing outrage that "such a thing could happen to a child".