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It’s dominating the bestseller lists and is worth £24m a year. Literature of misery has become the book world’s biggest boom sector, writes Anthony Barnes
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 the Sunday Times paperback bestseller list. The author Torey Hayden, a US child psychologist, has sold more than 1.5 million books 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." — By arrangement with The Independent
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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.