in being sick of these books

[upsylazy]

AIBU to be getting a tad sick of the plethora of tales of tragic abusive childhoods or am I being callous? the last time I went to WHSmith,there was an entire section dedicated to "tragic life stories" Iknow all these people have been through hell but it feels though there's a rather unhealthy competitivess over who can caim "the worst childhood ever"Iknow nobody forces anyone to read them but AIBU to think that avid readers of this genre are a bit odd?

someone posted a really funny link on another thread about these misery memoirs, i'll try and find it

ah ha
www.panmacmillan.com/displayPage.asp?PageID=6107

they are awful

Tell you what is good, though and that Helen Forrester's misery memoirs (published in 80's so before current flux of misery)

Graphic detail of poverty, neglect and fecklessness in depression era Liverpool and the most disturbing account of the menarche

Ah, grief-porn.
Angela's Ashes was great, as long as you remembered that he made all the misery up as he went along (according to his estranged family)
The others, I can kind of understand reading as some sort of cathartic someone-understands if you've gone through the same, but privileged, "normal" people reading them is just odd.
I've never looked at the Helen Forrester books, I thought they were all shawls and going up chimneys but then meeting Mr Right-Rich and it all ending happily ever after. I love Liverpool though, so might give em a go.

no there's no happy endings, oh no

not sure about her other novels, you may be right about chinney sweeps actually,
but the autobiographical ones are OK- USP is 'unself- pitying'

Before this current crop didnt the memoirs concentrate on how well people had done?

What the flip is that one I read? Its about a Labour politition who arrived in London with a quid and ended up going to Oxford etc.

I am heavily pregnant so am not going to get up and go and find it. You will just have to guess what I am blithering on about.

The books seemed to be more inspirational and have some sort of a point to them.

No disrespect to the authors of the genuine misery books. Their stories are valid even without the happy ending. But there is a sense that publishers trawl the internet, support groups looking for someone who has the crappiest life.

I know magazines do this. Some of my friends who are also bereaved parents have been approached via their children's memory websites.

We are insatiable as a nation for the thrill of emotional tourism.

(sorry about spelling throughout. I think pg hormones have finally taken over my brain)

This article from a couple of years ago was a really good discussion of this, I thought. Repellent as it is, I think her suggestion that misery lit is erotically gratifying for some readers, and that's part of why it's so popular, has some truth to it. Yurgh.

OP, YANBU

Haven't read any of them; have no intention of doing so, and was horrified to realise they'd achieved some sort of status as a genre (Gawd help us) when I saw them listed as 'Painful Lives' - a whole separate category of Waterstone's shelving-system.

I can see that they may cater to some sort of deep atavistic need for some people but that doesn't make me want to read them.

I couldn't get past the first few paragraphs of that article puddock linked to. I'm going to have to log off and watch something jolly on kids' tv to wash it from my mind.

yanbu
Some doctor/psychologist on daytime TV said that if you keep having these books lying around where children can see them, it sends an uncomfortable message about adults finding titillation in children's suffering.
I think he might have a point.