Out Of Their Misery…

In an era of true story magazines, celebrity gossip and ‘reality TV’ – where the more depressing or ‘challenging’ the stories are, the better – is it any surprise that people now talk of ‘Misery Memoirs’? Emma Bowler investigates.

“I hate misery memoirs, I’d never write one,” disabled writer Kate Ansell recently told Able magazine. “For a start, my life’s not that interesting. Second, there’s the whole ‘disability porn’ thing where I’d doubt people’s intentions in reading it – y’know, they’d just like the gory bits.”

Misery Memoirs are a bit like marmite: you either love so-called “mis lit”, in which authors tell of their triumph over personal trauma (what publishers refer to as “inspirational lit” or “inspi-lit”), or you hate their intrusive, personal and sometimes condescending nature. Love or loath them, though, the popularity of such books has risen hugely over the last few years; when the likes of national bookshop chain Waterstone’s starts displaying books in a section called “Painful Lives,” then something is clearly going on!

While many books are about grinding poverty or abused childhoods, a significant number are also by and about disabled people. So, why do people write them? And why do so many of us want to read them?

A SIGN OF THE TIMES?

It’s fair to say that the recent popularity of misery memoirs has gone hand in hand with greater demand for celebrity magazines and reality TV shows – that reveal the lives of celebrities and/or real people. Thalidomider Rosie Moriarty-Simmonds – her autobiography, Four Fingers and Thirteen Toes, was published last year – thinks she knows why. “Reading misery memoirs satisfies the inner nosiness in us all,” she told us. “We want to know about other people’s lives. They are a form of escapism but they also have that element of human interest and satisfy our curiosity about other people.”

Though Angela’s Ashes Irish author Frank McCourt’s memoirs of an impoverished childhood in Brooklyn and Ireland – arguably kicked-started the genre, it was A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer (1995) that’s most often credited as giving the misery memoir wings. Yet it’s possible to find much earlier examples which focused much more closely on the lives of disabled people –My Left Foot (1954), Tongue Tied (1974) and Under the Eye of the Clock (1987) were each autobiographical accounts of living with cerebral palsy.

So what prompts disabled people to bare their souls and divulge every intimate detail of their lives? When a simple request for assistance on a plane prompted an air hostess to ask Sarah Anderson, “Will you be my baby?” she was inspired to write her own story – Halfway to Venus: A One-armed Journey. “I wanted to let the world know what it’s like to be different,” she said. “Lots of people just don’t have the imagination to know what it’s like.”

A desire to provide insight and educate also spurred Rosie. “The subject of thalidomide has always been in the media and members of the public are always interested in the individual stories of people with thalidomide,” she explained. “I thought that if no one but my family bought the book then that was fine, but if other people bought it that would be an added bonus – they might find it interesting and it might educate them.”

GOOD FOR THE SOUL

Getting a life story down on paper – warts and all – can be a difficult, personal process but it can also be cathartic.  Sarah found that working through her childhood experience of having an arm amputated because of cancer enabled her to reach a sense of closure in terms of accepting what had happened to her. “When I first decided to write the book I felt I couldn’t move on until I had done it,” she told us.

Such books can also have a positive effect on their readers. “One woman who had a disfiguring birthmark said mine was the only book she’s ever read that she can empathise with,” added Sarah. “That makes it worthwhile.”

Portrayals of disabled people as “courageous”, “tenacious” and “inspiring” often rankle with disabled people, but does this mean that misery memoirs are detrimental to how disabled people are perceived? Rosie thinks not. “I think these sort of books are good, especially if they are written by disabled people – then you get the real facts, the real story,” she said. “Books by disabled people come from the heart. They don’t pull any punches. What you read is how it is.”

PUTTING YOU OUT OF YOUR MISERY?

Before you go rushing off with a desire to educate the masses, “out your demons” or pitch yourself as the next Dave Pelzer, do remember publishing is an extremely competitive industry. “It’s not that easy for anybody, disabled or not, to write a book,” says Waterstone’s Jon Howells. “If someone thinks it’s a quick and easy way to riches they are sadly misinformed. Thousands of books are published in the UK each year, and most don’t reach anywhere near the bestseller lists.”

Besides, the word in the publishing industry is that the popularity of misery memoirs is now on the decline – at least among the publishers who commission them. Yet Jon Howells doesn’t think that misery memoirs will vanish from our bookshops any time soon. “This is a genre which won’t be as big as it was four or five years ago, but there’s always a market for a good story well told,” he told us.

Some say that the new trend is for celebrity misery memoirs. OK, that rules out most of us, but disabled celebrities take note!

Some early examples of misery memoirs.

My Left Foot, first published in 1954, was the autobiography of the Irish author, painter and poet Christy Brown. The book inspired the 1989 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis, who went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Tongue Tied was the autobiographical memoir of Joey Deacon, published by Mencap. Royalties from sales and further donations enabled Joey, and the friends who had helped produce the book, buy their own home.

Under the Eye of the Clock was the 1987 Whitbread Award-winning autobiography by the Irish poet and author Christopher Nolan. Unusually, Nolan chose to write it as the biography of a young disabled man called Joseph Meehan.