Misery Lit
A new and sinister display has hit the shelves of WHSmith. 
The ‘Tragic Life Stories’ section is available at a branch near you, ready to fulfil the most rabid desire for other people’s misery.
Decked in nursery pastels with ‘handwritten’ titles, there’s a story for every affliction. Plenty of child abuse, of course, with lurid titles like Stuart Howarth’s “Please Daddy No.” Others are more enigmatic, called things like “Scarred” or “Hidden”.
The last thing I’d want is to belittle the authors of such books. They’ve been through terrible things, they’re often very brave. But the handling of their stories seems more than a little exploitative.
Blogger Chris Applegate hits the nail on the head with his entry on ‘Grief Porn.’
“Each person’s unique and horrible life story has been carefully commoditised, packaged and airbrushed into a book seemingly indistinguishable from the rest. While sold as someone telling their unique life story and experiences, in actual fact they just become another brick in the wall.”
More recently, Iain Rowan asked if people come “home from work to curl up with a glass of wine and a nice story of someone being beaten as a child.”
A psychiatrist of my acquaintance told me he’d recommend these books for abuse victims, to help them understand their situation. Six shelves in a national newsagent, however, is more than a therapeutic tool. People read because they enjoy it. So, what’s to enjoy here?
As a nation, the UK is addicted to ‘grief porn’. It makes us campaign for the return of unknown children, and mourn hysterically for a princess we’ve never met. Obsessed with the evil of paedophilia, we can’t help but look, just to check how bad it is. It almost has a strange glamour.
Observer blogger Rafael Behr blames the media itself for this phenomenon. But as always, there’s a continuum of supply and demand here. Not that I’m excusing us.
In a shameless plug for a friend’s site, feel even grubbier with film blogger Babbit’s entry on ‘Torture Porn.’
comeinfromthecold said,
May 15, 2008 at 12:13 am
The classic, quintessential work of the genre is, of course, David Pelzer’s ‘A Child Called “It”‘. He has now written about twenty sequels and spin-offs. There’s something slightly queasy about making a career out of a psychologically disturbing childhood.
I think when it comes to the readers and consumers of “grief porn” though, there are distinctions to be made. For example, I think people travelling the length of the country to attend Holly Wells and Jessica Chapmans’ funerals is ghoulish. Most people do live quite extreme lives though – if you get talking to people, you soon realize that most people have suffered traumas of one sort or another, and I think people take solace from reading accounts of other peoples’ lives.
Also, I wonder if the term “grief porn” is really just intellectual snobbery. A lot of adolescents readers wallow in vicarious misery, it’s just a more literary variety – the reason Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Wertzel are attractive to the teenage pysche is because they talk about the extremes of human experience. My old English teacher used to say “the three most interesting subjects are death, sex, and suicide”. She wasn’t far wrong. Personally, I’d rather read a grief memoir than a novel of middle class adultery in Hampstead.
Good article though. I like.
Leon said,
May 15, 2008 at 12:21 am
It must be because people take a kind of horrid pleasure in learning about other people’s suffering. Or it makes people’s dull little lives seem better in comparison.
This seems to be a long term trend. Even books like Anglea’s Ashes were busy ladling on then grief nearly a decade ago.
I have always had a suspician that greif porn came about because it was a way of people venting their general grief about thier lives in general which they felt unable to express in other ways.
leonuclan said,
May 15, 2008 at 12:43 am
There is a large difference between being drawn to books which talk about the extreme of human nature and books which simply wallow in it.
Phillip said,
May 21, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I think the watershed was the death of Princess Diana.
I also think it’s cultural. For so long Britain and its citizens have been… well, stiff upper lip. We often don’t understand or look askance at other countries, especially to the east, where public mourning is loud and unrestrained – it looks histrionic to us most of the time. But because for so long our response has been to grit our teeth and get on with life (“Hanging on in Quiet Desperation is the English way” – Floyd), perhaps the shell is starting to crack a bit.
The media contribute, of course. Propagation of grief; an invitation to assimilate it, to make it yours too. ‘Ghoulish’ certainly rings true. I don’t think all these televisual tears are right. I don’t think these campaigns of grief have any fidelity. A spanish kid – a boy – of about the same age as Madeline went missing only a week before. Barely anyone breathed a word.
It really gets to me. It’s such a contrivance; such an artifice. People don’t need grief to feel validated. Humanity isn’t something you should have to prove.