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Constance Briscoe, the author of the misery memoir Ugly, is being sued for libel by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, who says it's fiction.
Will the case help to discredit the whole icky genre, true or false? Let's hope so. It has been reported that sales of miz-mems are down by nearly a third from their peak - but that still leaves them taking a major chunk of the whole biography market, once the celebs have been discounted.
If you check out the mizzy section in WH Smith, there's an amazing quantity of formulaic product out there, obviously feeding a habit. They all boast much the same picture on the cover - bleached-out kiddie - and use much the same title too.
Past participles drive home the bad thing that happened - Disgraced, Abandoned, Forgotten, Broken, Deceived, Shattered, Sold, Cut Or the heartstrings are tugged by the purported actual plea of the child in the midst of abuse: Please, Daddy, No being the highwater mark here, the tortured infant punctuating correctly in extremis.
Daddy, I regret to say, appears often, in ominous terms: When Daddy Comes Home, Daddy's Little Girl, Dance For Your Daddy, Daddy's Rules, What Daddy Did And even if he's not actually named, he's nearly always pretty firmly implicated, a cracker here being Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes.
As the miz market has matured, it has become highly competitive. Some publishers profess simply to have the leading product - "the most shocking true story of abuse ever told" - while others promise abundance - "Four heartbreaking true stories of damaged children" - while others again have begun inventively to hybridise the genre with other dependable earners - "The true story of the psychic powers that saved me from a life of abuse "
On they roll, I regret to say, bought and consumed almost exclusively by women. Why? I'd like to believe that it's because women are in general more empathetic and caring and therefore more engaged by these grim recitations. But I fear it's more likely misery memoirs are women's equivalent of military history for men - scenes of disaster that perk up the reader, thinking, from the comfort of the armchair, "I've got my troubles but there but for the grace of God "
It is Philip Larkin who provides the universal review for all misery memoirs whatsoever, past, present and future, in his great lyric This Be The Verse, with its briskly plot-summarising first line, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad."
In the final quatrain, Larkin says: "Man hands on misery to man./It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself." It's the only logical conclusion to draw from reading misery memoirs. That's why they deserve to wither and die. Soon, please.
Cavalier with girl power
The Devil's Whore, the enticingly titled Civil War drama on Channel 4, has been earnestly embraced by some pundits as an overdue celebration of English radicalism. They are welcome to this production, as far as I'm concerned. It's utter tosh, hopeless mummery.
Perhaps it's a special defect of mine never to take seriously the impersonation of great historical figures such as Cromwell and Charles in television drama. And maybe I could get over the fact that religion has been cut out of the story in favour of politics. But structuring the whole thing around a frankly modern heroine like Angelica Fanshawe (Andrea Riseborough), flirting her way through the entire Civil War, is just too silly. All historical dramas turn out, in due course, to have been about their own time but not often so quickly as this.
The constant gardener
The Garden Museum, newly reopened in the disused church of St Mary-at-Lambeth on the Lambeth Palace Road, is a modest affair. But that's as it should be. Gardening is an art of modesty and self-effacement. It's wonderful that our greatest living gardener should be so deservedly celebrated in its new show, Beth Chatto: A Retrospective. She's one of the people I'm glad to share the time with, somebody I've never met but who has decidedly influenced me, nevertheless; in how I see plants; how I, amateurishly, garden. And thus, maybe, in more than that too.
Now in her mid-eighties, Beth Chatto speaks about transience in a way that accords perfectly with her respect for limitations and seasons in her own gardening. “We all pass on, our gardens change. Many disintegrate and disappear. That's not important,” she says. “What matters is the continuing cycle of sharing and learning about plants, and perhaps a little bit of us remains with our plants.” Such a modest ambition, in her case so abundantly achieved.
Reader views (2)
As an abuse victim, stories like those you mentioned have helped me deal with my own problems. Its hard to face things that have happened when you feel alone.With books you can read in private, especially dave pelzer's story it has helped me to become the success story I have along with the help of remaining family.
Your article is highly offensive and you mate are a loser.
- S Jones, cardiff, 29/01/2010 16:00
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That's strange, Mr Sexton, because in the book Cry Silent Tears, the Author Joe Peters grieves the loss of his father whom he loved and the abuse came from his mother & her friends but oh wait, all the books must be the same because you say so. How convenient that you've followed Carol Sarler's attack on "misery memoirs" in the Daily Mail two days earlier, it's always nice when Associated Newspapers follows a theme isn't it?
And are you really naive enough to believe that the packaging of these books is down to the authors and not the marketing team? It all depends on the story, if it's powerful enough to sell itself then I agree, the cute kid marketing shouldn't be overdone. Otherwise, please stop trying to decide what people should read, if these books fail then they will sit in the library forever after six months. At least there's an open credit for the ghostwriter with most misery memoirs, unlike the average shallow empty celebrity book in the charts. Or should we only feel sorry for cute blonde blue-eyed abuse victims that don't live to see school?
- Doublenine, London, 24/11/2008 23:32
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