Earlier this year, Sunny McCreary’s book, My Godawful Life: Abandoned. Betrayed. Stuck to the Window was published, its cover image a lost-looking little boy staring out of a car. The catch? There’s no Sunny McCreary, and the book is a spoof on the genre which, alas, has taken the publishing world by storm. The title sounds amusing, until you compare it with a few real-life titles: my personal favourite being Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes.

Don’t mistake me: I am not laughing at suffering. The suffering of children has been, in the past week, high on the news agenda: but when I see pictures of the bloodstained clothes of Baby P, I begin to consider the exploitation of suffering. Misery memoirs often seem to be exactly that. It’s hard not to squirm when reading their jackets and I often have the sense that this is a kind of permissible pornography. In this context it is permitted for anyone — not just those we like to consider perverts — to read about sexual abuse, about beatings, about the destruction of innocence. All is allowed in the name of “self-help” and “self-esteem”. It’s no wonder the books are so popular. There’s a lot of money in pornography, too.

Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’, published in 1995, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the genre. Pelzer now has six books to his name, having moved from memoir to the giving of advice. Certainly it is possible to argue that writers such as Pelzer perform a valuable service: there are those who have found the courage to speak out through reading books like his.

The libel suit brought by Constance Briscoe’s mother against her daughter for the allegations in her memoir, Ugly, raises another difficulty. Medical evidence has been brought to counter some of Briscoe’s claims, but surely in other areas it will be impossible to prove a memory. Whose life is it, anyway?

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