Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Readers Love Misery Lit
The Guardian on the popularity of misery lit, aka 'Inspirational Memoirs' or 'Painful Lives,' those books filled with 'neglect, violence, and sexual abuse. ... These are not, one might say, tales to be read with pleasure. And yet a quite astonishing number of people want to read them all the same. ... Reproducing like bacteria, a new literary genre has wholly infected the bestseller charts. As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of similarly grinding childhood misery.' Most of the readers (85%) are estimated to be women.Books mentioned are Please, Daddy, No by Stuart Howarth; Damaged and (forthcoming) Hidden: Betrayed, Forgotten and Abandoned, both by Cathy Glass; Kathy O'Beirne's autobiography Don't Ever Tell; Abandoned by Anya Peters; Wasted by Mark Johnson; Dave Pelzer's memoir, A Child Called It (2000), the forerunner of the genre.
Labels: autobiography, memoirs, misery lit
