David Gray = Good Writing Music

FACT.

I’m not sure what the dealio is if you live in the US of A, but in Ireland and England there’s a huge market for sappy, glurge filled biographies about people who had spectacularly abusive childhoods. The whole trend kicked off with A Child Named It by Dave Pelzer. Now, in Europe-land the book has a soft-focus photo of a child staring morosely out at the reader, something which has (unfortunately) become the template which all other books in the ‘genre’ are now designed around. According to Amazon, though, the American version sports what may be the stupidest looking cover I’ve ever seen – kind of like a mixture between a self-help book and one of those embarrasingly cheesy Christian pamphlets that appear in your mailbox from time to time. You can compare the two here and here if you’re interested.

Up until now these books have been a mildly irritating addition to the Cosmic Annoyance Background Radiation that I deal with every day by being forced to interact with the world, but on my latest trip to England things came to a ridiculous head. I went into a WH Smith, the English equivalent of Eason (the Irish equivalent of whatever crappy, stationary-and-magazine-filled ‘bookstore’ exists in your part of the world) and found an entire section that was actually called ‘Tragic Life Stories’. It was filled entirely with books that, if laid out end to end, would not only circle the Earth twice but would also look very much like one gigantic, unholy series. Or possibly a ‘Cycle’, since these things should be listed under ‘fantasy’.

Please, put down the pitchfork; I’m not saying these things are made up (although I doubt every publisher on Earth has been able to resist the temptation entirely), but they really are a form of twisted fantasy novel that people with ordinary upbringings gobble up enthusiastically. Why? Do they harbor a burning desire to connect with the least fortunate people in the world through the powerful medium of the written word? Hardly. People read this stuff because they’re voyeurs, and the writers have given them a trainwreck of a life to gawk and point at. It’s the same principle that sells cheap tabloid newspapers: throw something shocking and unsettling all over a page and people will flock to it. They’ll bemoan the state of humanity and weep profusely over the plight of people like Dave Pelzer, but really they’re getting a sick thrill out of his books.

And the worst part about all of this is that, on some level, they wish that they were the people these books are about. That might sound a bit strange, given that these are about fairly extreme examples of child abuse, but think about it this way: here you have a man who has told his story to a large portion of the world and garnered gigantic amounts of sympathy (and money, but we’ll leave that out of the equation for now). In today’s attention-craving society, that kind of universal goodwill from perfect strangers is like winning the Emotional Lottery. This stuff isn’t ‘inspirational’, it’s sick titillation and wish-fulfillment.

Another name for the ‘genre’ is ‘Misery Lit‘, which is pretty appropriate. You’ll find a few examples of outright hoaxes on that page, and I’m sure more are going to come to light.

So, what’s the point of all of this? I’m certainly not saying that people shouldn’t write about abusive childhood, nor do I begrudge authors for turning their tragic circumstances into a way of dealing with the pain and (hopefully) making some money out of it too. What I do dislike is the way these (usually) heartfelt memoirs are being treated like tawdry romance novels and trotted out at budget prices for people who haven’t read a proper book in twenty years.