PRESENT TENSE:IF ANY GOOD has come out of the economic crisis it's that among those hit hard are the misery memoirs. There's a certain irony in the idea that misery lit will finally get an unhappy ending. We can surely look forward to a publisher getting a title on the shelves. The book's jacket will have a youthful editor, fringe wet with tears, eyes wide from reading too many manuscripts, and the faux handwritten title: "Not Again, Boss: One Person's Terrifying Story of Abuse, Horror, Pillage and the Fading Market for Such Things."
The genre's marketing power has been fading in the US for a while now, and the UK booksellers have noticed the market for abuse and abandonment and whatever else you're having has shrunk significantly. Although Peig proves that downbeat memoirs are hardly new here, Irish booksellers notice a similar trend.
The Irish and British book industry last year made over €10 million from a genre that the bookshops labelled "painful lives" until - having perhaps realised that this sounded, you know, a little gloomy for books about incest - rebranding them as "inspiring lives". Presumably, they are inspirational because the reader ultimately learns that the author survived, went on to tell their story and then sell it to publishers who doubled as ringmasters in an emotional freakshow.
You think you've read miserable biographies, they tell you, but you ain't seen nothing yet. Come inside and be thrilled by tales of terror, awestruck by abuse, scarified by the scars. All these books look the same. And I'm not saying that as a dismissive generalisation, as if they all look the same to me. They all really do look the same: picture of unsmiling child; muted pastels; script font; half the book's word count used up in its title. It has forced the marketing people into this ludicrous display of its wares, waggling their scars to lascivious, shelf-crawling punters.
So they have such titles as No Way Home: The Terrifying Story of Life in a Children's Home and a Little Girl's Struggle to Survive. Or Deliver Me from Evil: A Sadistic Foster Mother, a Childhood Torn Apart.With a book such as My Name Is Angel: This Is My Story: A Traumatic True Story of Escaping the Streets and Building a New Lifesubtlety is not a priority. Instead, it is the need to hammer home the theme before the customers' eyes drift to another title.
The argument has been made that these books allow the victims to turn an emotional corner by telling their stories, and for some readers to come to terms with their own problems through reading someone else's. That may be true of some writers, obviously, and some readers. And it may once have been true of some of the publishing houses that printed the books before they became a mass industry. But it has been a while since the publishing industry allowed them to be released into the public with restrained dignity. Instead, they have become cannon fodder in a publishing war. The only value their horrific stories have is as hard currency.
You have to believe that at some stage in recent years an editor has taken a look at a manuscript and thought: "You know if there was just another couple of beatings, maybe a death of a child or something, then maybe I'd be more interested"; that a marketing mind has said, "Our rivals found a blind girl who was chained in an attic for 15 years. Can we get a deaf-mute in a basement or something?" And maybe there's even been an author or two - or their ghostwriters anyway - who felt it worthwhile to give the publisher what he wanted.
Either way, it is a sure sign that the genre has reached saturation point that so many titles could just as easily be spoofs. Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigaretteshas been a big seller in Ireland, but at first glance it's hard to empathise with the author's experience when the title verges on parody.
Obviously, it has all gone towards feeding the public's appetite, which, until recently, has been insatiable. Their readers are predominantly female, who have long been attracted to those "true lives" stories in the women's magazines or of Hallmark movies - tales that followed the standard template of crisis, withering hope but eventual survival. The literary explosion has been a curious trend, with the growth of misery coming at a time of great prosperity and its decline now coming during a recession.
Perhaps we'll shake off that unnerving "poverty nostalgia" that gripped Ireland during the boom and that has been reflected in the taste for tales of how bad things used to be - even if there are many reminders of how cruel children's lives can still be. Or perhaps a collective boredom is setting in among a readership desensitised by wallowing in increasingly lurid tales of torture. Perhaps there's a point at which they begin to distrust them.
Whatever the reason, the tide is going out for the genre. Don't cry for them.
