venta

A few months back, I was killing time in a motorway service station shop. I forget exactly why I was doing this, or which services I was in. Anyway, I found myself browsing among their selection of paperbacks.

There were a couple of "bloke books", in the Andy McNabb or thriller vein. There were a couple of celebrity biographies. There were a lot of books that, if correctly applied, would change the way you eat, make you thin, restore your energy, or turn you into a wonderful cook. Alledgedly.

But the overwhelming majority of the available titles were personal memoirs of people who had suffered various forms of abuse. These are the books I'm writing about, so approach with caution if you think that's a subject you might not be comfortable reading about.

At my previous place of employment, The Book People used to bring a hefty dose of these memoirs every time they came by. I often used to start reading them in the staff room, then give up having decided that actually life was too short and maybe watching the microwave go round might be more fun.

In each case, there didn't seem to be much substance to the book other than detailing the abuse which had been suffered - though admittedly I never got past the first few chapters. One of the things which put me off more than anything else was that they were all written in the same, dull, matter-of-fact tone. Perhaps this is deliberate - after all, these terrible things were daily, matter-of-fact occurrences for the child who grew into the author. But for the reader, it just makes a tedious book. The more bad stuff happens, the less impact any of it has.

I read a few chapters of Ugly, Constance Briscoe's account of her childhood at the hands of an extremely abusive mother. It was a recitation of facts, told in childlike language and with very little discernible flair for writing at all. Recently, I discovered that Constance Briscoe is a judge, and thus presumably quite a smart person. This surprised me; I'd expect anyone with a decent education to be able to do a better job of telling a story.

There is, of course, the obvious flaw there: people who write these memoirs aren't setting out to create a great modern novel, they're intending to tell their story. Writing about these experiences can, I imagine, be very traumatic and perhaps literary style isn't the foremost thing in the mind. I could certainly believe that the writing can be a very therapeutic process; if someone who suffered an abusive childhood finds it a helpful thing to do then I'd very much encourage them to grab a pen and get started.

But here's what I don't get... While I'm sure some pulishers are lovely people who are kind to animals and everything, I don't think they'd print a book just because it was part of the author's therapy. If a book gets printed, someone somewhere thinks it will sell.

There are so many of these memoirs on the market that, unless the publishing industry is having some kind of collective brainfade, they must be selling. Publishers are clearly falling over themselves to find people who can write ever more horrific accounts of what happened to them during their formative years. So here's the question: who is reading them, and why ? I'm sure that such experiences could make a good (if harrowing) read, but I don't understand the appeal of a never-ending stream of similar subject matter.

The blurb on the back of the books habitually describes them as "uplifting" - the fact that someone can rise above this awful childhood and make something of themselves (or even not go stark staring mad) is life-affirming and inspirational. However, while I have the highest respect for someone who does survive such experiences, I don't find reading about them life-affirming. I find the books (in my limited experience) dreary and degrading. If I want my life affirming, I'll read Manalive or The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon and no one will at any point have to get raped in a dingy basement.

I'm horribly afraid that somehow, for some reason, people actually enjoy reading the tales of emotional and physical cruelty and revelling in the sordid detail. The paperback is the new Tyburn, and we can watch others squirm and gasp and suffer while masking it as a life-affirming tale of a child's triumph. It makes me feel uncomfortable when I see yet another pile of books, their titles a dead giveaway, and makes me wonder if all we're managing to do is exploit a little further someone who's already taken some of the worst things the world can throw at them.