Tragic Life Stories.........

[Cloo]

It's everyone loves a victim, innit. I'm not gonna shit on the writers for writing them - God knows it must be helpful to get it all out, and good for them surviving various awfulness, but I can't imagine reading a book full of these recollections again and again.

It is a version of grief porn - people being oh so moved and oh so saddened by the sufferings of someone they've never met, when they wouldn't think of going round to check when they hadn't seen the old lady next door for a few weeks and there's a funny smell coming from there. We wallow in these things to hide from our insufficiency in actually relating to the people around us.

 

[Louloubelle]

There are also some incredible first person memoirs of harrowing childhoods / traumatic lives, etc.

just off the top of my head

If This is a Man - Primo Levi
My Dark Places - James Ellroy
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey

I'm sure the list is a very long one.


The fact is that exposure to adversity is character building and makes for a good story. You only have to read Dickens to appreciate that. people who have nice, pleasant, uneventful lives don't make for exciting reading.

Having said that, I'm reminded of a recent documentary about the history of British children's comics. The progression of the development of the narrative in girl's comics was really fascinating. Up until the 1950s the girls' stories had been famous 5 type adventures with jolly hockey sticks and spiffing tales of good girls winning awards for good deeds and thwarting the cunning plans of bad people. Sales declines in the 50s (IMMIC could have been the 40s) and so the publishers commissioned focus groups to establish what it was that girls wanted to read. The astonishing answer was tears, misery and tragedy.

Cue stories of crippled ballerinas, horrific bullying of tearful heroines by their peers, sadistic governesses torturing sweet maids and that kind of thing. Sales soared. The more misery went into the story lines and the more the heroine suffered the more the tills rang with the sound of kerching!

The interesting question, IMO, is why?

eta

just a thought

Eminem's mum's memoir of her life with him has just been published. His fan base is both male and female and a lot of his lyrics are about the misery and alleged abuse in his childhood. He is of course a brilliant lyricist so it's not just a case of someone moaning about the trauma of their childhood in an inarticulate way. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a female thing

 

[madzone]

I have to confess to buying books fom tesco when I'm doing the grocery shopping but lately I've really struggled to find anything that isn't about a miserable/abusive childhood. I ended up reading My Booky Wook becasue it was either that or some persons misery vomitted onto paper. I'm currently reading about someone who cuts up dead bodies or the same reason

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

A lot of these books provide a means of the survivor getting their story out - having been ignored and disbelieved for years.

A lot of shit goes on that people would rather pretend doesn't exist because it's so awful - hence these books make people feel uncomfortable and sneer at them as a defence mechanism.

Survivors of abuse are still roughly at the point that domestic violence victims were in the 1950s - basically people would rather they just shut up, kept it to themselves and not "spoil things" by forcing the world to acknoweldge what happens behind familial closed doors.

Word.

 

[madzone]

I can understand why people write them but why people read (more than one of) them is beyond me really

 

[salem]

My ex used to get 'love it!' magazine and I'd usually have a quick shuffle through the pages myself. The stories were just unbelievable. Every week a good few stories of multiple murder, adultery, rape, abuse etc. Fortunately they highlight the important sentences so you can usually read a 3 page article in a minute or so, I couldn't imagine reading one of these books for fun.

I think it's something of peaks and troughs though. If you start the book with them having these terrible lives then even the mundane "and now me and my new hubby Dave are happily married with 2 kids..." ending feels great while still being quite easy to relate too.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

Ah, from the long line stretching back at least to 'Our Tune'...

Oh, our tune, that brings back memories.

They used to be so tragic, they started to get funny, I used to think someone must be making that up, no one's *that* unlucky.

Someone would be on honeymoon and come off a moped and end up having life saving surgery and be in a coma.

They'd come round and be airlifted home where they'd be having corrective surgery and there would be complications and they'd lose a leg.

Then because of all the time off sick, they'd lose their job.

And then they'd lose their house.

And then their other half would be diagnosed with a horrible lurgy.

And then to top it all off their cat would die!

 

[extra dry]

read one of 'Scot of the Antarctic' books that is a struggle over adversity...eating the dogs..then each other...

 

[Detroit City]

Anyway, have you read any of these - what did you gain from it? Hardly light holiday reading after all............

no i haven't read any of them but i would assume the people who do are just looking to read about a life that is/was worse than theirs currently is...

 

[isitme]

some of them are good

'I know why the caged bird sings' and 'My Sweet Orange Tree' are the two that spring to mind. I enjoyed those two books because the characters in them both had a very good outlook on life despite all the shit they went through. It is a bit dodgy how it has been turned into a genre but everything is like that, it's like moaning about their being 'crime' books when crime isn't really that much fun

 

[Detroit City]

It is a bit dodgy how it has been turned into a genre but everything is like that, it's like moaning about their being 'crime' books when crime isn't really that much fun

anything to make a buck i guess

 

[isitme]

well they are shops....

 

[Louloubelle]

a few more that spring to mind

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
The Kiss : A Memoir - Kathryn Harrison
The Liars' Club : a memoir - Mary Karr
Permanent Midnight: A Memoir - Jerry Stahl


All written by authors with considerable skill, not just "misery lit"

 

[madzone]

no i haven't read any of them but i would assume the people who do are just looking to read about a life that is/was worse than theirs currently is...

I think it's sometimes the opposite. One of the reasons why I stop using online support groups for my illness ( and was reluctant to join a real life one) is that it can become a competition to see who's the worst off You get people trying to outdo each other in the symptoms and hardship stakes. I joined one for a bit but some people used to get resentful if you were getting well. I think these books help some people stay where they are and think 'woe is me'.


But then I'm a hard faced bitch

 

[madzone]

a few more that spring to mind

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
The Kiss : A Memoir - Kathryn Harrison
The Liars' Club : a memoir - Mary Karr
Permanent Midnight: A Memoir - Jerry Stahl


All written by authors with considerable skill, not just "misery lit"

None of those on the shelves at tesco though

 

[DotCommunist]

Ennit, and they pre-date the thing that is reletavly recent-the specific target marketing of misery memoirs.

 

[Maggot]

None of those on the shelves at tesco though

You should buy your books at a bookshop - not a fucking supermarket.

 

[spanglechick]

Having said that, I'm reminded of a recent documentary about the history of British children's comics. The progression of the development of the narrative in girl's comics was really fascinating. Up until the 1950s the girls' stories had been famous 5 type adventures with jolly hockey sticks and spiffing tales of good girls winning awards for good deeds and thwarting the cunning plans of bad people. Sales declines in the 50s (IMMIC could have been the 40s) and so the publishers commissioned focus groups to establish what it was that girls wanted to read. The astonishing answer was tears, misery and tragedy.

Cue stories of crippled ballerinas, horrific bullying of tearful heroines by their peers, sadistic governesses torturing sweet maids and that kind of thing. Sales soared. The more misery went into the story lines and the more the heroine suffered the more the tills rang with the sound of kerching!

The interesting question, IMO, is why?

eta

just a thought

Eminem's mum's memoir of her life with him has just been published. His fan base is both male and female and a lot of his lyrics are about the misery and alleged abuse in his childhood. He is of course a brilliant lyricist so it's not just a case of someone moaning about the trauma of their childhood in an inarticulate way. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a female thing

interesting... my only real comment on the phenomenon til now was at my old school - these books used to be hungrily devoured by girls of around 12-14. slightly disturbing, how into them they were.

it's less so at my current school, although it's all girls at this school. maybe it's because the old school was in the suburbs and my many of my current kids are living in pretty extreme poverty etc

 

[spanglechick]

btw - i don't think 'down and out in paris and london' really fits. it's all a bit 'common people' to me.

 

[madzone]

You should buy your books at a bookshop - not a fucking supermarket.

I know - I'm thoroughly ashamed

And skint and lazy

 

[madamv]

I've never understood the appeal, whether they're fictional or 'real life'. Jude the Obscure has got to be the most depressing book I've ever read

Lord, yes! Thats the only book I have sobbed and sobbed and sobbed some more. Totally fucked with me.

I never read the books this thread is about... I do love autobiogs though.

And madz - whats the dead book youre reading?

 

[madzone]

And madz - whats the dead book youre reading?

The Resurrectionist (sp)

I've only read a dozen or so pages, I've been dipping in and out of an alan bennet book I got from that 2nd hand book stall on the southbank and the i ching

 

[Ranbay]

ASDA yesterday....

 

[DotCommunist]

See what did I say earlier in the thread? 'Ware the faux-hanwritten title and pastel shaded books.

Misery memoirs went formulaic and precision targeted after the rocket success of a Boy Called It. Transworld or imprints there of perhaps?

 

[madamv]

The Resurrectionist (sp)

I've only read a dozen or so pages, I've been dipping in and out of an alan bennet book I got from that 2nd hand book stall on the southbank and the i ching

Bad reviews on Amazon so I would be interested to know what you thought when youve finished it (lol)

 

[madzone]

Bad reviews on Amazon so I would be interested to know what you thought when youve finished it (lol)

I doubt I'll get any further with it tbh, it seems a bit 'clunky'.

 

[rosa]

ASDA yesterday....

Fucking hell, i thought people were taking the piss when they mentioned 'Please, Daddy, No' as a title...

i'm not in anyway trying to downplay the seriousness of child abuse or saying no-one should talk about it,but surely that's seriously unhealthy and gratuitous.

 

[miss direct]

I read "little prisoner"...(in my defence, I was unemployed and had a lot of free time and it was from the library)...pretty awful and some things just didn't add up.

Ugly by Constance Briscoe was also pretty dire. Actually, I never got to the end of that, I gave up.

However, I read Sara Payne's A Mother's Story and thought that did not fit into the above categories. It wasn't so much misery fiction as the story of what happened to an ordinary family when something so awful happened to them. It also told a follow up story, the court case, and about Sara Payne (the mother) meeting people from government and campaigning.

I don't make a habit of reading these books although it may seem like it. I just read anything and everything once. I won't be reading any more of that sort of book though.

 

[Stoat Boy]

A fan of the sub-genre known as Irish.mis lit.

Nobody does misery like the Irish.

Although to be fair a lot of the more recent works have been more fiction than not.

 

[Epico]

I wonder if they'd be a market for my writings about my comfortable, happy childhood...