Child Abuse
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A happy childhood, as Frank McCourt observed in Angela's Ashes, is hardly worth your while. Well, not if you are planning a career as a bestselling misery-lit author, it certainly isn't. In fact, given that so many abused/starved/neglected/beaten children have grown up to be millionaire authors on the back of their earliest recollections, it's a wonder that no thwarted writer has yet sued his parents for wilfully and recklessly depriving him of a deprived childhood.
If you are an aspiring novelist whose infancy was marred by regular meals, presents at Christmas, bedtime stories and braces for your teeth, I'm betting there's a lawyer out there who could work that up into a substantial damages action.
Indeed, given the gravity of the allegations made in the millions of "miserable childhood memoirs" that have flown out of bookstores in the past decade or more, the wonder is that there haven't been more law suits, both civil and criminal, arising out of this genre.
One of the few to hit such an obstacle was Kathy O'Beirne's memoir of a horrific life in the Magdalene laundries, which sold 400,000 copies worldwide. But after Kathy's Story was published, the Sisters of Charity issued a statement insisting she had never set foot inside any of their institutions, either laundries or care homes, and five members of her own family claimed she was a vindictive fantasist.
Constance Briscoe, now a successful English barrister, judge and bestselling author, is being sued for libel by her mother over claims of neglect and cruelty she made in a book entitled Ugly: The Story of a Loveless Childhood.
Briscoe senior's chances of winning the case must rest on whether her daughter could have no compelling objective evidence of her claims. But then, in even the most verifiable recollections, objectivity is never a strong feature. Childhood is a profoundly subjective terrain. Children who lived through real hardship can recall their early years with belated appreciation of their parents' struggles, while others who grew up in comfort can turn out embittered memoirs motivated by an inflated sense of injury or indifference.
McCourt often gets the blame for kicking off the whole "misery-lit" genre with Angela's Ashes, but a good 20 years earlier Christina Crawford set the ball rolling with the sensational Mommie Dearest, an account of life with her alcoholic and unstable adoptive mother, actress Joan Crawford.
For years that scene where young Christina is flailed with a wire coat hanger for the crime of hanging her clothes on its cheap metal shoulders reigned as the high watermark of "misery-lit" cruelty. Since then, of course, it has been overtaken by memoirs of childhoods so grim as to make Mommie Dearest, to quote Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, look like Winnie the bloody Pooh.
Even before that, the Monty Python team parodied competitive misery in that famous scene where one old man reminisces about how his family lived in a shoebox at the bottom of a lake with only sand to eat, and the others all chime in: "Sheer bloody luxury!"
Somehow, though, the Celtic-tiger boom years seemed to deprive us of all critical faculties in respect of ever-more-wretched childhood memoirs. Even tales that were practically indistinguishable from parody sold like hot cakes. You might imagine that a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City belongs firmly in the humour section, but you would be wrong. Instead it is a genuine account of how "a young man meets his alcoholic father in a homeless shelter and writes bravely of his attempt to forge a relationship . . ." And nobody shouted "Why?"
In the good times, the public appetite for tales of misery and the authors' ability to churn them out grew as living standards and children's rights improved and strengthened beyond all recognition. Just look at the enthusiasm with which the flimsiest evidence of child torture and murder at Haut de la Garenne in Jersey was seized upon and investigated.
After all we'd heard, nothing seemed beyond belief any more, not even that bloodstained bath, the iron shackles and the skull fragments lurking in the basement of a children's home. But now it turns out that the bath was just rusted, the shackles were innocent iron fittings, and the skull fragment was a piece of a Victorian coconut shell.
So mundane realities, legal challenges and harsher times are all likely to result in declining sympathy and increasing scepticism towards these tales of childhood trauma. Once the misery genre peaks -- and that day must be close -- you're going to need a hell of a story, as well as rock-solid documentary verification, to convince both publishers and public you're not just making it up for a quick buck.
The real risk of childhood misery overload, though, is that we'll all find it hard to believe that genuinely monstrous parents and carers exist beyond the fevered and flawed imaginations of creatively bankrupt writers. If their stories stray too close to the improbable, victims and their social workers may find it increasingly difficult to get a hearing.
Imagine, for instance, that little Baby P had survived the torture that ended his life. Imagine that his psychopathic stepfather -- whose presence was kept hidden from social workers because the child's mother didn't want to lose her lone parent's allowance -- was rumbled and evicted, and Baby P's ordeal ended. His ripped nails would have grown back, his second teeth would have filled the gap left by those punched-out milk teeth, his bruises would have faded, his broken bones would have healed.
The mental and emotional scars wouldn't have been quite so easily erased, but imagine if he'd tried to tell his story in years to come? Who'd believe that such diabolical cruelty could go on under the very noses of the caring authorities in 2008? After all, his parents and social workers could point to that apparently comprehensive log of interventions, all of it now pitifully reproachful of official incompetence, which recorded little more alarming than sniffles and headlice. They could sue him for libel, and they'd probably win.
That phrase about throwing the baby out with the bathwater is clumsily inappropriate in the circumstances, but genuine injustice will result if this maligned genre becomes discredited by greedy editors and writers over-egging the pudding.
Who to believe in the Briscoe case is anyone's guess, but they are not the "victims" who should concern us. Real case histories will be lost and real villains absolved if we become too jaded by the misery of opportunistic chancers.
Paddy says: Can Ms. Power give even one example of an author that was abused/starved/neglected/beaten as a child and who has grown up to be a millionaire on the back of their earliest recollections? As someone who has sold a sizeable number of books based on a childhood that involved abuse/starvation/neglect/beatings. I'm not a millionaire - indeed I'm far from it. Perhaps Ms. Power would like to rethink and apologise for what I regard as a deeply hurtful comment. I stand over every word written in "The God Squad" which has now been in print and on sale for the past 20 years. While Ms. Power hasn't mentioned me or my writing in the above piece, it is my opinion that by inference she includes what I've written as being "Misery-Lit"