Will the misery memoir just go away already?

The other extreme irony about James Frey’s UK publisher claiming that the whole fabrication controversy “isn’t a story” is that in actuality, it could be a bigger story there than here. Why? The raging success of the subgenre known as the “misery memoir” where a seemingly ordinary person then goes on to write about his or her wretched life, thereby getting readers to commiserate or to feel superior since their lives are better than the authors. Recent examples: Dave Pelzer’s A CHILD CALLED IT, Kevin Lewis’s THE KID, Augusten Burroughs’ RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (whose 2nd sequel has led his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, to do the disclaimer thing)

So all this gut-wrenching in print is getting Telegraph Literary Editor Michael Prodger in a bit of tizzy:

These books invariably come garnished with a carefully defined set of adjectives that can be well merited: the stories they tell are ‘inspiring’, ‘profound’, ‘touching’, their authors are always ‘brave’ and the books themselves are never less than ‘remarkable’. The ordeals the authors have endured are undoubtedly harrowing in the extreme, their reasons for sharing their experiences are cathartic, possibly altruistic and totally understandable. The books world might indeed be a blander place without this grist. But where most non-fiction offers the reader a range of possible responses, these books offer, or rather demand, only one – empathy. With poignancy comes impoverishment.

The one word Prodger doesn’t use is ‘true’ but I guess going through each and every misery memoir and checking them for accuracy isn’t going to happen anytime soon, right?

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