Mis Lit: Misery is book world's biggest boom sector
It's dominating the bestseller lists and is worth £24m a year: how the literature of misery became the book world's biggest boom sector
Sunday, 4 March 2007
Print
Email
As page-turners go, they are hardly the most uplifting of reads. The abuse, pain and betrayal are often relentless. But "misery literature" has now become the book world's boom sector.
New figures show that the misery memoir market doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, with up to 10 new titles vying to be top of the glums each month. The top-selling misery memoir in the UK - Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin - shifted 278,000 copies in 2006, more than six times the number sold by last year's Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
Of the 100 bestselling paperbacks last year, more than a tenth were tales of real-life misery, and they make up six of the top 10 in theSunday Times paperback bestseller list.
The author Torey Hayden, a US child psychologist, has sold more than 1.5 millionbooks in the UK in little over two years, with titles such as Ghost Girl and Just Another Kid. With her worldwide sales in excess of 25 million, it is clearly not just a UK phenomenon.
The misery market is a key factor in the paperback world's new battleground, the supermarket shelves, with most of the sales going through stores such as Asda. However, bookshops are aware of the power of the genre, with Waterstone's installing a "painful lives" section and Borders establishing a "real lives" category.
At their core, most are chilling tales of childhood abuse with some form of redemption and triumph against adversity at the end.
Carole Tonkinson, the publisher at Harper Non-Fiction, which accounts for a quarter of the market, said: "They are appealing mainly to women with young children, so for readers there is a maternal pull to these stories which often have a child in peril, and a lot of the covers feature children."
Doubts have been cast on the authenticity of some bestselling titles and the misery they portray. Relatives of Constance Briscoe, whose Ugly sold 151,000 copies last year, have rubbished some of the childhood misery she wrote about. But telling the whole truth may not be the issue.
Waterstone's biography buyer, Peter Saxton, said: "I think non-fiction should be exactly that, but people read these books for a gripping read more than anything else. It's hard to imagine a reader feeling short-changed because such terrible things didn't happen."
Popular books
1. Behind Closed Doors
Author: Jenny Tomlin
Sales: 278,467
Synopsis: Sibling love prevails in the face of a childhood filled with poverty, domestic violence, sexual abuse and neglect.
2. Don't Ever Tell
Author: Kathy O'Beirne
Sales: 273,132
Synopsis: Dark memoir of a childhood destroyed by sexual abuse, teen pregnancy and cruelty in an Irish church-run workhouse.
3. Ghost Girl
Author: Torey Hayden
Sales: 256,076
Synopsis: A teacher in a small mid-Western
town meets a child so wounded she believes
she is a ghost.
4. Just Another Kid
Author: Torey Hayden
Sales: 159,219
Synopsis: Six traumatised children, deemed unreachable, find support from an exceptional teacher.
5. A Piece of Cake
Author: Cupcake Brown
Sales: 158,342
Synopsis: A young girl lost in the system is forced to fend for herself through prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gangs, violence and crime, until she turns her life around.
6. Ugly
Author: Constance Briscoe
Sales: 150,997
Synopsis: One of Britain's first black judges
tells of an abusive childhood growing up in south London.
7. Rock Me Gently
Author: Judith Kelly
Sales: 148,342
Synopsis: Disturbing memoir of a traumatic childhood in a Catholic orphanage.
8. I Choose to Live
Author: Sabine Dardenne
Sales: 141,584
Synopsis: The girl kidnapped at 12 by Marc Dutroux recounts the three months she spent hidden in a concrete cell, drugged, starved and relentlessly raped.
9. Street Kid
Author: Judy Westwater
Sales: 135,550
Synopsis: Memoir of a girl brutally abused, neglected and forced to fend for herself from age three, who is living alone on the streets of Johannesburg by 12.
10. God's Callgirl
Author: Carla van Raay
Sales: 125,183
Synopsis: To escape childhood trauma Carla enters a convent at 18, but by 34 she is a single mother working as a prostitute and decides to re-examine her secret past.
