Misery memoirs

A John Crace piece in today's Guardian G2 argues that misery memoirs are losing their credibility because two recent best-sellers have been exposed as fiction rather than fact.

James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (drugs and alcohol) and Love and Consequences, by Margaret B Jones (mixed-race foster child grows up in violent Los Angeles) were both marketed as first-person true-life tragedies.

Jones turns out, apparently, to be a well-educated middle-class white lady not called Margaret B Jones at all. Frey owns up to having embellished the truth. He had to, says Crace, because 'the bar for misery has been set almost impossibly high'.

Crace goes on to suggest that aspiring misery-memoirists should look to Dave Pelzer as their how-to guru. Pelzer’s 1995 memoir, A Boy Called It, continues to fly out of the shops – along with subsequent works of his that mine the same seam.

Anyone wanting to cash in on Mr Pelzer’s success might be interested in a couple of items on the WH Sm*th website. There, along with discounted copies of his books, they can pick up an 18-copy (empty) dumpbin in which to put them. For £233.82.

Mind, they’ll have to wait four or more weeks for it . . . and I can think of at least one that's available right now. For free.



For John Crace's article on how to write a misery memoir, go to
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2262445,00.html