The Pornography of Misery Memoirs
The Daily Mail 9th October 2007
You may remember the story of Dana Fowley.
She came to public attention after declaring that she still loves her mother, Catherine Dunsmore, even though Dunsmore “supplied” Dana, now 27, and her sister to a 15-strong paedophile ring, which systematically raped and molested her from the age of six to 15.
She made this statement of forgiveness outside the Edinburgh court in which her mother had just been handed a ten-year sentence for her astonishingly wicked acts.
On seeing one of her abusers less than ten years after her ordeal ended, Dana tried to kill herself with an overdose of insulin, before fully revealing her secrets to her husband Paul.
As a result, after Dana had kept what happened to her hidden for most of her life, her mother and the gang were brought to justice.
That was in June. So what has Dana done in the short time since then? Well, she’s been talked into selling her story to a publisher for a staggering £200,000, through Susan Smith at literary agency MBA.
Am I the only one to think that the gaggle of publishers who bid so high so quickly have more than a whiff of ambulance-chasers about them?
This is a young woman only now coming to terms with the appalling suffering she kept hidden for most of her life. Hers was the kind of experience that takes years to overcome in the gentle and confidential surroundings of the therapist’s room.
But, judging by the current trend for ever more graphic tales of sexual abuse, just months after seeing her mother incarcerated Dana will be expected to perform an emotional striptease and deliver up every graphic detail of her abuse for public consumption.
Every molestation, every forced depravity and every betrayal by her mother is likely to be demanded in full colour for readers who will revel in the pornography of misery.
If Dana’s book follows the disturbing wave of recent misery memoirs, it will read as if you were there: as if you were the victim – or the perpetrator.
Even among the ghoulish world of misery memoir publishing there is a sense of shock at the haste with which Dana has been pounced on.
“I think it is going to be the most horrible yet,” says one ghostwriter, with a hint of relish at the detail it may reveal.
“I have heard it described as ‘the book to end all books’ on the subject.”
Well, I wish it were. Because the slew of such memoirs pumped out at the behest of supermarkets – which sell these books in the kind of quantities normally reserved for The Da Vinci Code – have crossed a line this year.
Rather than inspire, they risk titillating with the intimate detail they provide: members of religious cults rape young girls, fathers rape sons.
The descriptions are vivid and explicit as publishers fall over themselves to provide increasingly shocking accounts to take a chunk out of a market that is now worth £24 million.
In Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed, Stuart Howarth provides relentless detail about repeated rapes by his father. He was even forced by the brute to have sex with pigs.
David Thomas in Tell Me Why, Mummy provides a lurid account of his drunken mother forcing him to “pleasure” her.
In Damaged: The Heartbreaking True Story Of A Forgotten Child, Cathy Glass not only tells us that Jodie, a seven-year-old placed in her care, had been abused, but that within days of moving into the Glass home, the little girl was masturbating on the sitting-room sofa and smearing her face with excrement.
In each book you will read how children are abused, tortured and coerced into keeping Daddy’s, Uncle’s or Mummy’s “little secret”.
No wonder that some claim these uninhibited accounts offer paedophiles tips on how to groom children and ensure their foul activities remain closeted.
Not that the publishers and ghostwriters responsible see it that way.
“A lot of those readers are women with children,” insists Carol Tonkinson, non-fiction publisher at Harper-Collins, the market leader in misery lit – though the publisher prefers the name “inspirational literature” (like fairy tales, a happy ending is compulsory).
“Eighty-five percent of these books sell in supermarkets,” she replies, when I tell her about the unsavoury men I have seen hanging round the “abuse/incest” section in the Borders bookshop chain.
So why do they sell so well? I suppose that in the same way a horror film gives us a vicarious thrill by allowing us to be terrified without any risk to ourselves, so reading stories of abuse from the comfort of our sofas means we can experience the chill of fear and disgust as voyeurs, without ever having to confront such nightmares in our own lives.
Apart from anything else, they inevitably make us feel better about ourselves even if we have only vaguely functional families.
Carol Tonkinson is adamant the books serve a worthy purpose: they show victims how to escape abuse and warn those in its proximity about the symptoms. “The authors often say that writing the book has given them closure.”
Like many making money from this market, she is messianic in her zeal for misery lit and the importance of victims to put across their side of the story, although even she has qualms about what may be demanded of Dana Fowley. “We felt it was just too extreme for us,” she admits.
The “King of Misery” is Andrew Crofts, one of the ghostwriters of Jane Elliott’s The Little Prisoner (the story of a woman who was kept prisoner by her violent and sexually abusive stepfather); Stuart Howarth’s horrifying tome; and a book by Tom Wilson called Tears Before Bedtime, about the abuse he suffered in a children’s home, which is out this month.
“I feel strongly that these books need to be as open and frank as possible,” he insists. “Only by shining a bright light into the very murkiest of corners do we stand any chance of robbing these abusers of at least some of their power over their victims.”
But Crofts’ claim of empowering victims is not the whole story. The intimate exposure involved leaves every gruesome fact of a vulnerable person’s life in the public domain where they have no control over how it is used – or abused – by readers.
No wonder that therapist Barbara McKay, director of the Institute of Family Therapy, is sceptical about how helpful these books are to victims.
“In years and years of working in therapy with victims of abuse I have never come across one client who has chosen to write a book about their abusive experiences as a means of coping with them,” she says.
“Your future can define you as much as your past, but if you write about your suffering for public consumption, you are in danger of being defined only by your past, by the very thing you are trying to overcome.”
In other words, it makes it even harder to escape a terrible past when it is writ large in stacks in the aisles at a supermarket.
An argument repeated by publishers to me when justifying the harrowing detail is that “the readers of these books are less well educated and need graphic detail to make them understand the impact of abuse”.
Oh, please! How stupid does a person have to be if they don’t understand the terrible impact of sexual abuse without having to read the horrific detail?
The chief reason to include detail that borders on pornographic is to entertain a prurient readership which would otherwise be reading about Fred and Rose West in the kind of True Crime books upmarket publishers like to sneer at.
Publishers churn out these misery tales for one reason: they sell.
The phenomenon began when Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It raced up the charts in 2000. Publishers sat up.
When his follow-up books were equally successful – how many misery memoirs can one man write – selling 3.5 million copies in the UK alone, publishers did what they always do when they sniff a lucrative new market: they jumped right in. And they have been rewarded.
Toni McGuire’s Don’t Tell Mummy: A True Story Of Ultimate Betrayal, about a six year old abused by her father with her mother’s complicity, has sold a whopping 235,669 copies in paperback since publication in March.
The paperback of Stuart Howarth’s book has sold 107,168 since May, having sold a similar number in hardback.
Judy Westwater, meanwhile, who was “discovered” by John Peel on Radio 4′s Home Truths, has sold 204,743 copies of Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight For Survival since it was published late last year.
One publishing editor confides with a grimace: “We hadn’t published misery memoirs because we felt they were distasteful – there are things you should tell your therapist, not the whole world.
“But these books dominate the bestseller lists, so we had to get our hands dirty. So,” he takes a deep breath, “last year we bought a book that had been sent in for a low advance. We stuck a picture on it of a little boy curled up crying in the corner of a white cover and gave it a one-word title.”
The book, published with none of the brouhaha usually associated with launches, was snapped up by the supermarkets, which have more power than anyone to make a book a bestseller.
“In the first week it reached the top ten,” the editor recalls, amazed. “It was the most cynical piece of publishing we have ever done.”
For agents, finding an author with a juicy tale to tell is lucrative. Advances for disturbing memoirs have passed into six figures.
Fowley’s £200,000 pales in comparison to the £500,000 paid for Mark Johnson’s Wasted, in which the former drug addict described how his father’s beatings drove him to a life of crime.
With money like that changing hands, the pressure is on to deliver not just the “great writing” publishers like to boast about, but a story that will shock enough to get the author on the This Morning sofa on TV.
The editorial director of one house admits: “When these books come in for consideration, whatever anyone says, you are looking at how shocking the story is, and the marketing team is asking: ‘Is she promotable? Can she squeeze out tears on Richard and Judy?’”
As to the claims that authors and agents are performing a public service, he says: “If that’s true, why do the books always go to the publisher paying the most money?”
Even celebrities are under pressure to dole out graphic abuse. TV cleaner Kim Woodburn’s Unbeaten: The Story Of My Brutal Childhood rode high in the bestseller charts after her revelation that she secretly buried her stillborn baby.
Susan Lamb, of Orion, which published Dave Pelzer, says: “People want the author’s heart and guts hanging on the washing line.”
But just because readers want it does not mean the trade should supply it. A line needs to be drawn. Claiming that explicit stories of sexual abuse benefit abused people everywhere is wishful thinking.
Yes, there are victims who will recognise what they went through. And yes, the victims of abuse who “write” the books may find catharsis (it’s amazing how much a six-figure advance can help with that).
But presenting sordid detail after sordid detail so that it is imprinted in the mind of readers is not healthy for anyone.
It may plant a seed in the minds of some unsavoury readers over whom no publisher has control. For victims exposed to the prying eye of the public, it may make them more vulnerable, not less, and on some deep emotional level, it risks making us all an accessory to their abuse.
For publishers to claim a moral high ground about books whose contents would be better off kept between client and therapist is disingenuous. It is all about profits – especially when they come from supermarket-sized sales.
18 Responses to “The Pornography of Misery Memoirs”
Danuta – brilliant! I admire your courage to say this – it’s high time more people did. I’m sickened by the whole affair and continue to hope that we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. Of course we haven’t and as this spirals downwards the pressure is on to become more graphic and more horrific as publishers have to hope they’ll somehow keep selling.
Of course these books are a mirror reflecting some of what is rotten in our society. One in which vicarious living is becoming a substitute for real life.
Life is a precious and wonderful thing yet the media (including some publishers) do their damndest to keep reminding us how dreadful it all is. Having ghostwritten some books myself I can absolutely and unequivocally say that if I were ever approached with anything that was remotely associated with this kind of garbage I would say no – no matter how much money was involved. I argued the topic with my agent recently who was trying to defend the practice. It is indefensible.
I am so pleased to read your piece about these dreadful books – I cannot understand the mentality of the people who buy them. Readers are distastefully prurient at least and disturbingly peverted at the other to want to read this sort of drivel.
The people who are the ‘authors’ of these books are being exploited by cynical publishers who care nothing for their mental well-being. Yes, they can make a lot of money, but if the stories in these books are to be believed, no amount of money will make up for what’s happened to them. The subjects of these books need professional help, not further exploitation.
Great piece, there is something very unsettling about these books and I liked what you had to say on the matter.
Is there really one called Please, Daddy, No? That sounds like something Charlie Brooker would come up with!
Dear Danuta
Your article moved me to share my own childhood abuse story on my blog in preparation for my upcoming bestseller ‘I Was Locked In A Cupboard For Longer Than You!’
You can find it at
http://thepoetlaura-eate.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-was-locked-in-cupboard-for-longer.html
Enjoy (if that’s the right word). I can say as a victim it was certainly cathartic.
Seriously though – great article in the DM yesterday – about time someone wrote it!
Hi Danuta. Powerful stuff. I don’t get the misery lit thing at all. I know there is a lot of grim stuff happening out there, I don’t need to read about it. As you say it does seem prurient to keep going over the same old ground. How much more shocking/depraved does it have to get? I also think that as ever publishers are behaving like lemmings and terrified of missing out. Dave Pelzer’s story shocked because it was the first, now how shockable are we? And if we can read about all sorts of horrific abuse and not be shocked, isn’t it time we stopped doing it?
Thanks guys. I want to make clear that I don’t think abuse victims should put up and shut up, at all, but I do think that the explicit detail in most of these books is prurient and can only add to their abuse. I have spoken to a few therapists about the subject and they feel that this kind of book doesn’t offer closure. What I find most disturbing is that authors are being asked to follow up their “true” stories with fictionalised abuse books. It is happening. Believe me.
i think that its a good thing tha these things are open to children because they should know that little children around the world are getting abused and sexually harrassed by their own parents and relative llike in the book “Dont tell Mummy ” by toni maguire the little 6 year old girl is getting abused by her father and its sad how he kisses her …and how he forces her to have sex with him making…and you know making her touch and kiss it its really sad forcing little girls to do these things and also when the mother is not believing the little girl.
[moderator’s note: I have edited out graphic detail from this comment. This is my website and I don’t want that kind of stuff on it. Okay)
I loved the righteous tone of your article, and I use righteous as a compliment, because you’ve done a great job of calling something what it is: pornography.
Is the readership for these books necessarily a less educated one?
And has anyone accused you of being elitist for writing this article? Or of taking the moral high ground? (Take it!)
I am sure there are viable and important ways to share such stories through writing. There’s a whole subset of creative writing that treats writing (and reading) as therapy. But that is not what piling em voyeuristically high at Tesco is about, is it?
It would be interesting to consider books that treat this subject matter successfully, and that have been published in a less titillating or exploitative manner.
I do feel that writing about difficult childhoods is a valid and important thing – there’s this media image that parents are these ‘wise and caring’ people who do their best for their children and it’s the kids who are in danger of ‘going off the rails’.
Of course there are parents (like Dana’s) who are truly wicked. But far more who, for various reasons are rather inadequate as parents – neglectful or overwhelmed rather than cruel – and if you happen to have had that sort of upbringing then it’s comforting to know you’re not the only one. (My own upbringing was a bit on the turbulent side… adoption, then problems within my adoptive family – though nothing like the scale of the misery-memoirs books, I hasten to add!)
To give an example of some writing I think handles that brilliantly, I’d cite ‘The Illustrated Mum’ by Jacqueline Wilson – it’s fiction, from the child’s viewpoint.
Apart from Kevin Wilson’s The Kid (which I did find absorbing actually – doesn’t contain any sexual abuse, more neglect) I haven’t read any Misery Memoirs, but am sure I would feel very uncomfortable with graphic sexual abuse descriptions.
As other posters have said – this stuff does happen and I certainly don’t think it should be swept under the carpet for fear of offending delicate sensibilities. But on the other hand, I don’t like it served up for voyeuristic entertainment either.
Actually Andrew, no, no one has accused me of elitism. I think the comments justifying this kind of graphic detail from some publishers (that “the people who read this are not very imaginative and need abuse shown in detail to understand how bad it is”) is far more elitist in its patronising paternalism towards the “uneducated masses” than me saying, enough is enough.
To be honest Maria, I am wary of the argument that readers are “reassured” that they are either not alone or not as badly off as the people who write these books. It is the kind of argument used by the people who “slummed it” in the East End 100 years ago – or who go on s”ightseeing” tours of favellas in Brazil now. The fact that many of these books are read on holiday as beach reads says something.
Good arguments Danuta, and I hadn’t thought about the role of these books in inspiring or informing incipient child abusers, but it has a logic to it that has certainly been born out in other areas of ‘copycat’ violence. I have grave concerns about what such books do to their authors, who are plunged back into the graphic detail of their misery, and to other abused people who read them – the ‘compulsory happy ending’ is not much use to a person still struggling to find self worth after this kind of cruelty and may even make them feel less worthwhile.
And there are even copycat misery stories, like Judith Kelly’s which was pulled by her publisher after they realised she’d lifted large chunks of other people’s work and woven it into a misery memoir – what does that say about the industry, I wonder?
Having been labelled above as “The King of Misery” (an alarming title to find oneself with), can I just put the case for the defence? While I can’t answer for every memoir written which contains details of unhappy childhood experiences (stretching from Billy Connelly to Clarissa Dickson Wright), can I just stick up for the people who have approached me in recent years and asked me to help them write their stories? In every case I have found them to be remarkable people, far more interested in being heard, believed and read than in making money. In most cases they have endured years of being told they will never be believed, will never be worthy of love, that they should keep whatever has happened to them secret. It is my strong belief that no one should be forced to keep such secrets and that the more open, honest and courageous we all are in facing the truth of the evil which lurks within so many people, the more likely we are to be able to understand it and consequently to fight it. I am sorry if this makes life uncomfortable and distasteful for anyone who would rather these stories were not written (and I would certainly never suggest these books should be compulsory reading for those who would prefer not to) but I strongly defend the rights of the authors to be as candid and open as they wish in their bids to expose their oppressors.
Having read all these judgmental attitudes towards the readers and writers of the genre scathingly called ‘misery memoirs’ I feel I must add my comments.
Yes, some writers might be jumping on a band wagon in the hope of making money. And yes, some readers might be motivated by voyeurism. Some of the books might be badly written and ‘tacky’ but, as in all genres, there is good and bad writing. I cannot justifiably make judgmental generalisations about the motives of others. Likewise, I cannot comment about the particular memoirs, authors, or readers, referred to in your article, Danuta, as I do not know them at all, let alone well enough, to know if these criticisms are valid. What I do know is that I read memoirs of oppression to learn and try to understand from those who have ‘been there’ so that I can form opinions not only influenced by professional experts, but by the voices of those who have long been silenced.
I have written a memoir about the psychiatric oppression I experienced as a teenager in a mental institution. I can honestly say that my decision to try for publication was nothing to do with money. I felt that I had something to say that was worth saying, and now, as a mental health worker/trainer, I believe passionately that there is a need for the voices of those who were long silenced to be heard. After reading this article, and the ensuing comments, it bothers me that those who do find the courage to ‘go public’ after years of being told not to, may be seen as, at best, naive people without a mind of their own who have become victims of greedy and manipulative agents and publishers. Or, at worst, people only wanting to make money out of their miserable past.
Like many people who find their way into the psychiatric system I was brought up in a ‘dysfunctional’ family and subjected to abuse in childhood. I have not made childhood abuse the focus of my memoir, but I see no reason why others willing and brave enough to do so should not make this formerly taboo subject the basis of a memoir. When I was building up a life for myself I often found inspiration in reading about other people who had triumphed over horrendous experiences, many of which were much worse than mine. To know I was not alone helped me greatly. I grew up at a time when these kind of things just couldn’t be mentioned. Not even my closest friends knew what was going on in my family. I sought help for my depression only from professionals and, unfortunately, this led to the worst experiences of all.
I must add that I’m confused, Danuta, about your comment on fictional accounts of abuse, as if it’s also self-evidently wrong to write these, too. I am in the process of writing a novel, using some of the material dropped from my memoir, and writing about abuse in a different way from what memoir allows. This was my own idea and not suggested to me by my lovely and highly respected former agent (who has, sadly, died). If some readers want to read books only for escapism I have no problem with that. It is, of course, up to them. Many of the subjects I have chosen to read about have not been ‘comfortable’ but I feel I have learnt a lot from reading both fiction and non-fiction.
I find this a really interesting debate and (rather boringly) find myself in the middle. I have read Dave Peltzer’s books and was moved by them, but know that I would find much of the material about child abuse too upsetting to read, I would also find Stuart: A life backwards too painful to read. But like the later commentators here, I do come down on the side of encouraging people to get their stories out there. I am undoubtedly swayed by the fact that I write ‘real life’ stories for women’s weekly magazines, which have also come under fire for the ‘sensationalist’ nature of the experiences discussed. But I have seen first hand how the women who share their often traumatic experiences relish being heard. Also, I have always considered that these stories do provide hope and inspiration for others, whereas some people will dismiss this as a well-worn cliche.
Outstanding article. Just brilliant.
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Excellent article.
I have no qualms about people wishing to publish their memoirs, whatever the content. It’s the manner in which they’re marketed, from the memoir title, (one just knows ‘A Millionaire Called It’ will hit the shelves sometime in the near future) to the book sleeve, (can we make that skirt just a little bit shorter?) to their prominance in book stores. Waterstones has now taken these books from ‘autobiography’ to live in their very own burgeoning display shelves. I suspect the type of person that avidly reads this type of book will need their own cabinet at home for them. (‘Miseri’ from Ikea anyone?) (I feel a patent coming on….)
Despite my flippancy I think the form has its place on bookhop shelves – just not necessarily a prominent one!
If the justification is to help people, it should be in the self-help section, not marketed in the same way as an airport/supermarket blockbuster.
In addition the form has not been helped by the continuing exposures of fraud among some of its authors. Does anyone remember the exposure too of Frank McCourt following Angela’s Ashes? Although not blatantly marketed as a misery memoir, AA kind of precursed this whole trend, but proved an interesting sign of (some) things to come.
The fraudster authors have done no one any favours, not least themselves by discrediting themselves and the genre, as if the genre didn’t already provoke enough debate!
I had a difficult childhood myself (as alluded to in the comments on ‘I was Locked in A Cupboard for Longer Than You…’), but turn the question around to ‘How many people have actually had a happy carefree childhood?’, and I suspect these former children are more of a minority than we are led to believe.
The childhood abuses meted out to me were eccentric and occasionally harsh and unjustified, rather than evil. I suspect I am not alone.
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