'Misery lit'? It is about a victim's need to tell a story, sometimes in the absence of justice, writes Susan McKay, and it may also offer others the possibility of escape
It is easy to call books about ruined or salvaged lives "misery lit", and to ask, "why have we become suckers for a hard luck story?" It is easy to imagine the Irish Times reader curled up by the fire with a glass of wine, enjoying a true account of someone else's pain. Fiona McCann did this entertainingly on Wednesday.
But it isn't the full story.
Sophia McColgan wanted to change Ireland. She and her siblings endured a childhood full of violence and abuse, observed by adults who did nothing to help them. As a young adult Sophia found the strength to give evidence against her father, and then to take the State to court for failing to protect the family from his excesses.
When Sophia agreed to allow me to write a book about her life, it was because, she said, "it is only in silence that the abuser wins". Sophia's Story was published in 1998, so it is probably one of the first examples of the sensational "mis lit phenomenon".
It doesn't, however, have a "pale cover with a picture of a doleful child". It has a proud photograph of a smiling woman, Sophia, emerging from the Four Courts having forced the State to compensate her and her siblings for its ineptitude. She'd already had her father jailed for life.
Sophia was very clear about what she required of me. There was to be nothing in the book that would appeal to the sort of reader for whom cruelty and depravity towards children is exciting.
I was to write the book in such a way that it would encourage other people living in abusive situations to see that it was possible to escape. It was to warn them, though, that they would have to be clever - cleverer than the abuser - and that they would have to be prepared to fight for their freedom without assuming that other people would rush to help them.
She wanted to tell her story because it was important for people to know that a man could routinely batter his wife and rape his children and flaunt his dominance over them in a house in a village in rural Ireland in the last years of the 20th century, unhindered.
Sophia wanted to challenge readers about their own attitudes.
Plenty of people who had followed the McColgan court cases had blamed Sophia's mother, for example, for not saving her children. The bleak truth was, Sophia said, "she could not protect us - she was one of us".
She wanted it to be known that social workers, gardaí, doctors, priests, teachers, neighbours and other supposedly responsible adults maintained the silence that trapped her family for 20 years in a life-threatening environment that she was forced to call home. She also wanted people to know that although they couldn't rescue her, it was the love shown to her by her grandparents that saved her.
These are complex, important issues. The book was a bestseller, and still sells well. It is on reading lists for courses in social work.
We didn't make "big money". We did get a lot of letters and calls from readers who said the book had helped them. An alarming number asked me to write their book.
There is a lot of misery out there in Ireland, and a lot of people who feel that if they have been denied justice, they can at least tell their story. Joe Duffy's Liveline is testament to this, too.
I admit I was embarrassed when I saw Sophia's Story on a "painful lives" type stand in a bookshop a few years ago, alongside a couple of lurid titles. However, there are too many bad books of every kind published, and books about hard lives are not exceptional in this regard. Some of these are indeed, as McCann suggests, truly awful. Some are possibly full of lies.
Compassion is in order for authors who clearly needed counselling more than they needed a publisher. It can be painfully sad to read books by people who lay themselves bare before us, sparing no detail of their humiliation. It reminds me how some victims of abuse go on to work in prostitution. As if damage is all they have.
Sophia and some brave others like her really have changed Ireland. Maybe the woman standing beside you in the bookshop is another lover of "doom and gloom" in search of her "latest mis fix". Maybe she's someone who fears that her father might kill her soon if she doesn't find a way out.