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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Lives of Misery

  
 
Blake Head
17:36 / 16.06.06
“My childhood was one long scream of suffering which has haunted all of my adult life.”

Funny thing to read standing at the bus stop. But first reaction: “Right on babe, me too. Uh…” Anyway, this was the tagline for an autobiography called Kathy’s Story – NOW IN PAPERBACK – or to give it its full title: Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalen Laundries. If the prose is anything like as sensational and tasteless as the marketing, I can’t really imagine it’s worth reading, but from the high stacks of these books in bookshops the phenomena of “misery memoirs” seems increasingly popular. The hyperbolic nature of the presentation of this book provokes, I think, the “so what, most people could say that, get over it” sort of reaction, and I’m not sure whether that sort of glibness is problematic or not – or maybe I’m over-thinking the whole thing...

Anyway, is it acceptable to laugh at, mock or otherwise dismiss these people and their (no doubt genuine) tortured personal histories (which seems to be the obvious, instinctive reaction)? On the basis that one can relatively safely assume they lack taste, propriety, or positive literary qualities, that they polarise experience, that they seem to exist only to feed some horrible, voyeuristic pessimism about society? Is there an argument to be made that they are in anyway an authentic reclamation of childhood trauma? Is it relevant that the mode of cathartic reclamation is turning personal pain into public commodity? Is it a question of literary taste within one genre (let’s face it, none of these books are Solzhenitsyn) or is the above reaction more based on some social identification about the “sort of people” who read these books and those who don’t?

For example, I think I’m reasonably knowledgeable / understanding of some of the problems associated with gender assignment, but I have approaching negative interest in the esteemed Mr Pelzer’s work. I’ve read fascinating biographies dealing with trans issues (again, just as an example) which, crucially, read as more than just a history of victimisation, so I guess I’m asking whether books like Kathy’s Story are actually some different species of book or just a particularly repetitive sort of conventional biography. A friend has suggested that a recent book I Choose to Live by Sabine Dardenne is of a decidedly better quality, but I’m still not that tempted – anyone read it? Anyone read any good works within this burgeoning genre?

So… in an idly musing, potentially easy target sort of way: what do we think?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:34 / 16.06.06
Well, anything that raises awareness of this sort of suffering would seem to be helpful...
 
 
Jake, Colossus of Clout
06:30 / 17.06.06
Well, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs was good, but there wasn't an ounce of self-pity or "look at me, I'm so strong to have survived this" to be found, so I don't know if it counts. Burroughs wrote about his batshit-insane childhood with an irreverence that bordered on glee (although his prose was clunky at times), so I hesistate to label it a "misery memoir," because I laughed twice as often as I cringed.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:52 / 17.06.06
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage is another good childhood/adolescence memoir- some horrible stuff happens but again schmaltz is avoided by tying events in with the bigger picture of social history.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:01 / 18.06.06
Anyway, is it acceptable to laugh at, mock or otherwise dismiss these people and their (no doubt genuine) tortured personal histories (which seems to be the obvious, instinctive reaction)? On the basis that one can relatively safely assume they lack taste, propriety, or positive literary qualities...

Yes, I frequently laugh at and dismiss the suffering of those without taste. They're just not worth as much as me, you know?

For fuck's sake...

Which sarcasm is partially taken back, if by "they" you mean the books themselves. Dismissing the book about the suffering is different to dismissing the suffering, obviously, and I can see the unfortunate fact that a book-worthy life does not always correspond with an original book- however, I still think that it's good for books like A Child Called It to be out there- and I'm not really thinking about an audience of literary critics, I'm thinking about people who maybe don't read many books who might find the book helpful if they've been through a similar situation.

Assuming we're talking about books dealing with abuse as opposed to just unpleasantness, abuse is more likely to happen to those on the lower economic spectrum, and this group are the same people who have low literacy levels/low acess to literature, who are maybe going to watch Oprah's book club or buy books from supermarkets rather than reading the TLS or going to bookshops...in many ways I see a book like A child as something potentially very helpful to people who've suffered abuse and who fall into this category, as it's a sympathetic human voice- might also alay certain attitudes whereby a victim is said to have "deserved it".

Obviously this works within a bad system where lots of people don't have acess to lots of books. I'd like everyone to feel comfortable going to a bookshop/reading widely- but in the interim I feel the beneficial aspects of these books might outweigh the occasional poor literary qualities, so long as the books aren't so poorly written that they're actually propagating problematic rhetoric. Do you feel that they are doing so?
 
 
Blake Head
20:24 / 18.06.06
Apologies if I was unclear Legba, I thought the use of “literary qualities” would convey that it was indeed the books towards which I was being dismissive. I wasn’t intending to suggest an attitude that condoned the suffering or located a further responsibility for it in the victims. But in another sense you’ve rather got to the point that in publishing these autobiographies the authors are inviting comment and evaluation of their lives, and how they choose to present those lives, and I think it’s harder to differentiate between criticising the books and the subjects than you initially suggest. I wasn’t asking permission to jeer a certain group of people, but I would be interested in other people’s views on how far, in the case of biographies of those who’ve suffered traumatic experiences, how far tasteless, schmaltzy writing, or more inclusively responses to that trauma that we find problematic, serve to undermine the natural sympathy we’d be expected to have for people who’ve lived through those situations. None of which would make that suffering acceptable.

Quite sincerely, I’m not sure what I’m looking for in discussing this other than some vague hand-wringing and varying degrees of agreement that bad writing is bad writing. It might well be quite an obvious “fuck’s sake” answer actually, but I am disinclined to care about people who appear willing to exploit an authentically horrible incident in their own life, and to become publicly identified with it and in a way defined by it, and in general I’m put off by the vulgar way media dealing with such suffering is circulated, and I’d be interested in other people’s reactions.

It’s really very hard not to agree that these books raise awareness of issues and serve some purpose in allowing people who have gone through such situations to have an accessible source of sympathetic information. I do rather think, given their popularity, that they are being read with a minimal level of identification and primarily for the purposes of entertainment which is, well… weird. I’d find it hard to evidence problematic rhetoric on individual issues, but I’d agree that it’s a highly imperfect system where victims of abuse have their most immediate access to literature on the subject depending on what’s in the current top ten bestsellers.

I think, as you suggest, books like A Child Called It do highlight and provide information on issues which otherwise might be inaccessible for a relatively small group of people. For (somewhat) more wide-ranging issues like a culture of abuse within the Catholic Church, I’m not sure that multiple popular biographies are the best way to circulate repetitive information on the subject. On that basis, I think you have to address the other function these books have, the manner in which they are read, in their individual reactions to such abuse, and how their subjects only survived because of God, society, their inner strength… I’m not trying to be immediately caustic, but I think if we’re saying these inspiring, courageous stories are beneficial in that they display how people have recovered from, for example, hellish childhoods, and that as such others will be able to relate to them, I think it’s fair to be critical of that “journey” unless you take the position that whatever helps these people (both groups) is good. If you don’t, then I think questioning what attitude replaces the victim mentality, including questioning how well such a progression is written and related to that how well it serves as a healthy coping mechanism never mind personal philosophy, is prudent.

When I said that they polarise experience, I was trying to suggest that, collectively, they offer a simplistic, if detailed, model of a traumatic, negative event or events, and usually their eventual progression back up to a level of health and “normality”, and the focus of these books is almost exclusively defined by a rather limited relationship between that of extreme suffering and a rather mundane seeming functionality. Which, just personally maybe, seems to misrepresent a far more varied, chaotic, interesting view of what a valuable life is or should be, and deadens one’s senses to a list of interchangeable things that No One Should Ever Have to Experience. And in a sense I think that the method of their consumption and their seemingly interchangeable nature diminishes the import of genuine personal trauma, which I think bugs me more than bad writing in, say, disposable entertainment biographies. I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that these books aren’t without agendas and being the account of one person’s life they are by necessity going to be reductive to some degree in addressing a larger issue.

Talking really about the publishing industry now, rather than the authors, I also think it’s a worrying trend that in one sense this sub-genre is formally repetitive, and publishers are falling over themselves to put out largely identikit memoirs, which are increasingly marketed on the basis of novelty or escalation of trauma, and that those books which are most shocking or melodramatic are the ones most likely to get published and heavily marketed. Again I just think it’s distressing that the biographies which achieve commercial visibility are not the ones which are necessarily well-written or even possess some insight into the human condition, but perform the role of an increasingly idiosyncratic or sensational titillation – “I was abused by my grandparents AND the Catholic Church!”, “My two Dads made me gay!”, “My torture and rape by the KKK!”.

The examples that Jake and yourself furnished, particularly the intriguing Burroughs, sounded as though they existed outside or significantly expanded upon the basic structure of one person’s recovery from the horrors of… whatever… which I think, on its own, is the stereotype of what I’m addressing as a misery memoir. Bluntly, I don’t think that everyone who has been raped, assaulted or otherwise abused has a story worth publishing, except in the sense that we’re all special and beautiful and have some story to tell; it’s less a matter of originality than actually questioning the idea of a “book-worthy life” when the driving force behind the publication of these books is not literary merit. For me, I’ll be attracted towards a biography if it’s of an exceptional or significant individual from history or from a unique perspective in contemporary culture, if it’s likely to be well written and offer me some fresh insight on my own life, and preferably both. I don’t find suffering to be an intrinsically interesting phenomenon, and it’s a far from rare one, so I think it’s acceptable to desire literature which addresses more than just its most direct consequences, which doesn’t allow suffering to entirely define or flatten one’s autobiographical response, and to be critical of those books which propagate a view of life as a series of simplistic extremes with a corresponding attitude towards it.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
13:31 / 19.06.06
Well I wouldn't begrudge anyone who's had a difficult childhood, or really any other kind of second-rate life experience, the right to try and alchemise that into book sales - shit into gold is one of the things that writing's arguably about, I suppose. As, actually, is displaying your pain for all the world to (ideally) see, in the hope of securing a villa on the French Riviera, or wherever.

The trouble with the confessional memoir as form seems to be twofold though. First of all, a lot of these things are so badly written that it's often pretty clear that they wouldn't have been published at all if presented as fiction (Famously, this was the case with James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces,' and I'd be willing to bet he's one of the better writers in the field - God only knows what Dave Pfaz or whatever he's called is like,) so the fact that 'it all (supposedly) actually happened11!23!' is being held up as a virtue in itself. Which doesn't seem like much of a justification. And secondly, anyone's account of real life events that they've presumably suffered through is inevitably going to be slanted in their favour - however lousy a time you've had, do you then, automatically, simply because you can write just about well enough to get a book deal, have the right to drag people who are often still out there living and breathing, trying to make ends meet etc, through the court of public opinion? Fiction is a safe space for this kind of thing - you can tear into your parents, ex-lovers or employers as much as you like in the context of a novel and while they might know well enough who's being talked about, nobody else necessarily would. It's not as if the people involved have been actually named and shamed. (Slight sidetrack; the completely bewildering spectacle of the alleged target of the 'wronged husband' novel, I'm thinking Philip Roth and Peter Carey's exes here, announcing this to the papers and TV - if somebody, as a few people round here would be well-placed to do, decided to write a book about a gin-soaked old lady in North London, the last thing I'd be doing is going on Oprah to explain to the world that I was the inspiration, really.) So the use of living individuals seems unreasonable, given, I'd say, the extreme difficulty of being objective under the circumstances. There are no doubt lawyers who go through the material for anything overtly actionable, but still, to play God in that way, especially about events, if we're talking about a childhood memoir, that might well have happened twenty or thirty years earlier, seems a poor trick to pull. And let's face it, who remembers their childhood all that clearly in any case?

You could probably argue that any piece of writing, however autobiographical it aspires to be, is a work of fiction whatever, filtered as it's going to be through an individual's perceptions - my memory of a party you and I went to wouldn't be the same as yours, etc; perhaps the only way a non-fiction novel ever really works is if, as in 'In Cold Blood,' the novelist scrupulously keeps himself out of the book.

The other thing is, who actually reads this stuff? I can think of a number of things I'd like to be doing if I was on a beach at the moment, but having a £6.99 holiday in someone else's misery really isn't one of them.
 
 
Janean Patience
15:55 / 21.06.06
I've read Dave Pelzer, the abused author who started the avalanche, and I think there's something... pornographic's too strong a word, but that this genre's popularity is powered by interest in nasty stuff. More specifically, the audience isn't there for the author's triumph-over-adversity; they want to know more about the abuse.

I know that's strong and I'll try to qualify it. From a publishing point of view, the seeds of the genre are in the runaway success of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. That's not an abuse memoir and is actually a pretty good book, but the suffering of the children struck a chord and it became much, much more succesful than anyone expected. I'm guessing somebody in publishing worked out that what people remembered were the moments when Frank and his family were starving to death, the Christmas Day spent picking peat from the road, all the bits that exert a horrified fascination on the reader, and saw a new market to exploit.

Pelzer's A Child Called It was the trailblazer, and it's authentically horrible and possessed of no literary merit. At some point in his early childhood Dave's mum decided that he was there to be abused for her amusement, Christ knows why, and spent the next ten years or so seeing what she could do. There were beatings and starvation, and she used to mix chemicals in a bucket to make poison gas then lock him in the bathroom with it. Those are the more showy pieces of abuse. Much of it was more like endurance; he'd be made to stand in the cellar with his arms locked behind his head all night every night, or be forced to take ice-cold baths for hours, or have to skate up and down the street all day in winter with only a t-shirt on.

He was the only one of his siblings picked out for this abuse, which I believe is quite common in abusive families. He wasn't actually called It; that's an invention of the title, but was only ever referred to as The Boy. Eventually, after it became all but impossible to ignore, he was taken away from the family and placed in a home. He had very little contact with the family ever again and grew up and triumphed etc.

It's the abuse that fascinates, though. The ingenuity of it, his mother always thinking of new tortures and ways to test her son. I was bought the first book before it became obvious this was a genre. I read the next two at a friend's one morning with a hangover. I've used the same joke about it every time I've been asked about it, saying I only read the first one because I got bored after the abuse stopped, and each time it's met with laughter and agreement. From four different people so far, hardly a conclusive sample but not unconvincing.

You sense Dave knows it as well. Chronologically, there's no abuse in The Lost Boy or A Man Named Dave but he's saved two juicy bits of abuse for each volume. He even opens the second book with his mother trying to make him eat the baby's soiled nappy, in the same way standard autobiographies open with the exciting bit then flash back. He, or someone writing these books, appears to be aware that the readers might want to read about the triumph of the human spirit but they want to know the gory details of what it triumphed over.

Who actually reads this stuff? Moving into total conjecture here, I'd say the audience will be mostly female. This may be a newish genre in literature. Newspapers and magazines have been selling stories about pain and suffering for years, and they generally sell better to women. Take A Break, Real Life, all the UK magazines that sell this stuff have huge audiences, and the Daily Mail (which attracts a massive female readership) specialises in tales of suffering after the fold. The specific focus on child abuse, and physical rather than sexual abuse, is all that's new.

It's possible these books could help people. Someone could read about Dave and see themselves, or a member of their family, in there. I don't think that's especially likely, though. The specific focus on child abuse, and physical rather than sexual abuse, is the genre just as much as a soft-focus cover and a handwritten title. The overwhelming majority of abused children, certainly to the extent that readers in this genre demand, suffer sexual abuse as well. That appears in these titles much more rarely.

I know I've said some contentious things and hope they'll be taken as my opinions and best guesses rather than fact. If not, feel free to pile in. My memoir 'Online Whipped: the Forum That Hated Me and How I Survived' needs a bit more colour.
 
 
Janean Patience
11:41 / 21.03.07
As an addendum to the above, I noticed a new section in Waterstone's in Manchester at the weekend:

"Painful Lives"
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:43 / 21.03.07
Really? Oh for fuck's sake. This sort of thing really, really pisses me off.

The following is related to race and class rather than troubled lives, and is from a student's perspective, but I think it may shed light on a similar part of the trend. The blogger (not me) is far harsher than I would be, but:

I've been thinking recently about some – haha - 'issues' that X has been bothered with. The main problem is that he's stuck in a prose workshop with a tutor who thinks the most important thing about a piece of literature is the 'issues' which it explores. X's contention is that, rather than writing about, say, A Gay Man, one should be writing about a man who happens to be gay, or that rather than setting out specifically to write about Race you write a properly formed character for or to whom race causes certain things to happen. In other words, do not be afraid of writing them, but keep your political, economic or ethical arguments separate from your works of art, otherwise the latter will not be works of art but propaganda – and, most criminally, boring.

I'd like to add some thoughts to this. One is about the terminology being used here: for a tutor to push for “issues-based” stories really smacks of ignorance of one central point: that stories do not work around “issues”, but rather “problems” - indeed, quite bare mathematics. Take Romeo and Juliet for example. The story is, essentially, Romeo and his family + Juliet and her family, and it works - it works because there is some kind of logical computation occuring, the meat of the play being the answering of the question. Whereas, what the play certainly isn't is an 'exposé of gang violence in contemporary culture', in which the questions have all been asnwered (allegedly) before the film starts. So, problems, not issues.

The above point suggests the next. Still using Romeo and Juliet as a model, notice that the drama plays out on what we might complicatedly call a meta-contemporary level – it resonates on a wider plane, that of humanity, than simply being a peice of interest to the Elizabethan English – which is a) why you can easily set Romeo and Juliet in India or Brazil, or anywhere where there are people, and b), is one of the reasons why we are still enjoying it today. The same is true of all good works of art, wherever or whoever they are from – universality. Which is why, if you set out to write about Heroin Addiction (contemporary, e.g. those anti-drugs films they show to schoolchildren), instead of writing a story in which addiction occurs to a character (universal, a related example might be The Lotus Eaters), you are steering for trouble.

I would also question why exactly we need Issues Based Stories when we have products like hip-hop, online diaries, or even old favourites like essays and newspaper collumns. You might claim that the last two are exclusive, in that they require some level of reading stamina, but then so do stories, and pop music (as a discourse) and blogs are open to, not everyone, but certainly to a massive ammount of people. In fact something like the Public Enemy records, as a body of work, strikes me as infinitely better than these Stories - not just better at tackling the blessed issues, not just more democratic, but actually good works in their own right. You can dance to them, and they have a sense of humour, as opposed to something like Jumpa Lahiri's book Interpreter of Maladies, which I dislike intensely and will return to.

A further point I put forward somewhere else was that really, it rather takes the piss to look at the (very real and troubling) situation “Some people are excluded from enjoying works of art” and decide that the cure for it is “Enact a sweeping dogmatic change on all forms of art so that anything which doesn't appeal to 'the average audience' gets the chop”. Surely the answer is rather “Let people have a better education”? Or is that too much to ask? And actually, who is this 'common audience', and who says that they won't understand Shakespeare or Henry James, alongside pop music and the rest?

It smacks of a disdain for “common people”, a disdain so strong that when hidden under a fluffy layer of liberalism, it comes back as something far more destructive for trying to be helpful. It smacks of a hidden fear, a fear so terrible it is literally unspeakable: a fear of educating the masses – the idea that, rather than see that come to pass, it would be better to make a nursery rhyme out of culture in order to accommodate the inequal status quo, is taken as read right from the start.

Need I restate that the idea that one piece of art is somewhow 'more inspiring' or 'more accessible' than another is complete horseshit? The idea that human + (X work of art) = Progress, and that you can distill this fabulous X by getting rid of everything that quotes from Latin, or is about the aristocracy, or is in French, or that takes more than a minute to enjoy properly, is ridiculously mechanistic, and simply doesn't reflect how people interact with books or paintings or music or anything else.

Does that make any sort of sense?
 
 
penitentvandal
22:14 / 21.03.07
Makes sense to me.

The bookstore chain I work for is, like Waterstones, setting up a 'Real Lives' section for all these abuse memoirs. Really annoys me. 'Real' life = horrific suffering then? Fuck that.

And I can confirm that, from my impressions of consumers of this genre, it's the abuse they're after, not the survival. I look at it as a kind of emotional porn.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
10:49 / 22.03.07
However, I believe Dave Pelzer is now trying to start a career helping people who have suffered trauma and abuse to overcome their demons, so if so fair play to him, as otherwise he'd have enough money to spend on all the Primal Scream therapy he could want.

I'll admit, I've not read a word of any of them, but working in a library I see them going out to the same people that enjoy the grizly true crime books or the Aga Saga books about young girls who grow up between the world wars and have 400 pages of unremitting misery. My admittedly prejudiced and unscientific feeling is that this stuff is mainly for people who have mostly no personal experience of the subject but to have the pleasure of feeling 'my life might be shit but at least it's not as bad as theirs' and really, do they not have a right to read and get pleasure from stories of human suffering as well?
 
 
Janean Patience
11:20 / 22.03.07
Dave Pelzer is now trying to start a career helping people who have suffered trauma and abuse to overcome their demons.

Given that Dave - or 'It' as I call him - has enjoyed considerable success, they may be keener to find out how to exploit their demons than overcome them. Which, of course, they have every right to do etc etc. There is something in this genre that reminds me of the books of Nazi atrocities sold in sex shops in the 1960s. Then again, I read about serial killers sometimes. We're all guilty.

I was quite, quite wrong in my earlier post when I said that sexual abuse wasn't yet part of the pain-tasting genre. It seemed to me there would be legal problems involved unless the abuser was dead, and further legal issues if anyone else (siblings, etc) were involved. I don't know if the books was just arriving when I posted or I failed to notice them already out, but there's sexual abuse everywhere on the supermarket bookshelves now. A preferred path appears to be from the orphanage to the brothel, taking in hypocritical Christianity along the way.

I've been to sexual abuse trials and the details are utterly horrific. You want to purge your mind afterwards. The idea of reading it for fun...
 
 
DaveBCooper
14:57 / 22.03.07
Good comparison with the Nazi Crimes information - in Apt Pupil, Stephen King refers to it as (if memory serves) 'the gooshy stuff', and I can't help but think that applies to all the Pelzer books and their like.

It has, to my mind, become almost laughable at the moment, the deluge of these books (like the swarm of Mockney Gangster Films in UK film a few years ago), and I rather admit I find myself siding with the mentality of Andrew Collins's book 'Where Did It All Go Right?' in which he deliberately wrote a book about how generally happy his childhood was. Or as Bill Hicks put it "my one-man show is called "Daddy never screwed me, Mommy never beat me'".

Granted, there's a place for true stories which could shed light on genuine hardships and the triumph of the human spirit, etc, but it does rather seem that publishers are racing them out in an hand-rubbingly unseemly fashion, and I can't help but wonder if posterity will see these books more as 'A Million Little Pieces' over and over again as opposed to The Diary Of Anne Frank (arguably the best book in this vein, to my mind)...
 
 
All Acting Regiment
22:27 / 22.03.07
Because it was a genuine artefact, most probably.
 
 
Blake Head
23:07 / 22.03.07
Hmmm. I wasn’t exactly feeling genial that week was I?

I remember that at the time hat got to me was less the content of the books and more the marketing of them. I don’t think I mentioned it upthread but the same week I found a display stand that had collected this style of books under the legend “Tearjerkers”, and there’s just something about the violence of that phrase, the physical extraction of sympathy, that makes me think that, as Velvetvandal says, these books are being used as some form of emotional pornography. Possibly related to the idea of renting a good “weepy”, but with a more unpleasant presentation of misery and physical abuse rather than unhappy sentiments.

Incidentally, I did eventually skim through I Choose to Live, which is ultimately maybe a poor example for the purposes of this thread, because the author is careful to present the abuse that did occur in a discrete, non-sensationalist fashion (tasteful if that’s possible), and to focus on both her historical and present resistance to the psychological transformation/damage that such abuse commonly inflicts, while, to be honest, the writing wasn’t of sufficiently high quality to make the unique facts of the case particularly interesting as literature.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
23:28 / 22.03.07
Did you feel a bit ambivalent about your choice to carry on living after reading that, BH?
 
 
Blake Head
23:37 / 22.03.07
Excuse me?
 
  
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