Book publishers often claim that misery memoirs are popular because they provide life-affirming stories of survival. In truth, the reason why they sell in millions is because they give permission to the reader to enter into a supposedly private world of intense degradation, appalling cruelty and pain. These memoirs confess to so much that they take on the character of a literary striptease. They provide titillating and very graphic accounts of traumatic pain which actually turn readers into voyeurs. And, as in real porn, there is a lot of faking going on, too.
So writes Arts and Letters’ Frank Furedi, who sees in “misery memoirs” potentially dire cultural consequences.
Me, I tend to view this type of analysis with suspicion, not least because I think turning readers into voyeurs is what writers often intend to do—some more artfully than others, naturally, and some with the express intent of signaling the performative (see, for instance, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur). In fact, even those writers who wish you to “interact” moreso than “watch” are using techniques to guide you along—making you “see” what they want you to see. Which has the effect of creating of you unwitting voyeurs—not necessarily to the story, but rather to the author’s design.
That aside, Furedi’s real complaint is not so much the voyeurism these books compel but rather the toxic effect he thinks such misery porn has on the readers it targets:
In line with today’s prevailing cultural outlook, people are more and more expected to blame their personal failings on their parents or siblings. Stories of childhood misery continually inform us that regrettable events in our formative years determine our future destinies. Expressions such as ‘scarred for life’ or ‘damaged for life’ give us the impression that, no matter what happens to us as adults and no matter what we achieve, we remain prisoners of past events.
I think this is true to a point, but I’m not sure Furedi has the sequence here quite correct. Because I suspect that the “misery memoirs” he chastises are simply a reflection of a culture that has for years tried to turn personal responsibility into a “conservative” bromide—while ironically promoting the more toxic bromide that virtually none of our failings are personal, but are rather the product of a culture that inscribes us. Which means, naturally, that those who’ve surrounded us—and what we’ve read and seen and heard and internalized—are the raw materials of our agency. When “we” fail, the argument goes, the dialogical web that created “us” is therefore responsible, leaving us to tease out those moments and actors culpable for planting the seeds of our later troubles. We self edit in retrospect.
An elaborate component of the self-esteem movement, this procedure culminates in the “grouping” of those who’ve been similarly poisoned, so that they can commiserate over similar wounds, and gain the confidence to pass the buck, knowing that others will not only validate such an emotional crutch, but will turn it into a brazen defensiveness that actually strengthens the fierceness of the blame and the demonization of its object.
Of course, there are legitimate instances of scarring caused by prior events, but for the most part, these “misery memoirs” are elaborate attempts to explain away personal failures. Which, when you think about it, expresses a rather bold teleological view of the universe—and mimics, in that regard, certain religions in its attempt to find explanations for what may simply be accidents in a world governed by philosophical naturalism.
Or, to put it another way, this is but another secular religion that the left has constructed to take the place of a God they have intellectually killed off. It is of a kind with the very type of anthropic reasoning that gives us such concepts as “intelligent design”—making its adoption by many in the “social construct” crowd doubly ironic.
“Misery memoirs,” therefore, are probably less a cause of cultural problems than they are a way of reinforcing the ease with which we are capable of letting ourselves off the hook for our own problems. Which, though we aren’t always responsible for the problems’ proximate causes, we nevertheless have more power to correct ourselves than we like to admit to.
Which is not to say that everyone who reads or writes “misery memoirs” does so for the same reasons. In fact, a case can be made that reading a misery memoir and becoming a “voyeur” to problems that aren’t one’s own can be a cathartic experience—and could have the effect of helping a reader dispense with self-pity rather than embrace it. (Stephen King makes a similar argument for horror novels and violent impulses; Brett Easton Ellis? Not sure what he thinks…). Similarly, one can write a misery memoir for any reason—including to take advantage of their current popularity.
If Oprah didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her.
At any rate, an interesting read.
(h/t Brian Doherty)
Interesting. One finds something similar in Poe, in stories such as “Cask of Amontillado,” where one is buttonholed by the narrator, who goes on to tell you ghastly things. The reader is in the creepy position, since the story is narrated in first person, of listening to a psychotic lingeringly retail this episode, as though the narrator takes for granted that the reader will understand his compulsion and what lies behind it. As is the case with all horror stories, we expectantly desire what we also expectantly dread, which indicts our nature with every sentence’s step that we take.
Little off topic, but does anyone remember the Angela’s Ashes, the board game skit on Mad TV a million years ago?
Hilarious.
I loved teaching Poe—particularly the detective stories.
I taught a course on the semiotics of detective fiction, using as the points of comparison Conan-Doyle and Poe, filtering it all through CS Peirce (and Eco).
Poe actually gives clues to solve the crimes in the text-as-signifier. The Sherlock Holmes tales, on the other hand, rely on abductive thinking—though Holmes (ostensibly) argues otherwise. That is, the reader cannot be expected to solve the mystery without making a leap that Holmes himself makes unseen and explains, then, in retrospect, as deduction.
Or some such. I haven’t thought about it in ages.
Jeff, are you supposing that the left’s grievance-industry is just “Misery Porn” clad in a neglige?
British Liberal, Oliver Kamm has a jibing thought today:
If grievance-addicts “seek out” their “hurts” then, like other addicts, they’d seek to magnify and draw-out the “high.” So, it’s not hard to imagine they’d script, rehearse and stage their own offenses.
Can you say “Tawana Brawley?”
LMC–
Do you think an Elephant Man board game would be as good?
Dan,
Not as good as my Atari 2600 version of Midnight Express, the Return of Ahmet.
from comments here…
I think this lends a bit of weight to Furedi’s analysis.
Y’know, as a child of Baby Boomers, I’m inclined to cut people my age who blame stuff on their parents some slack. A lot of people, myself included, had to go looking under a lot of rocks to find moral instruction and guidance during adolescence. As anyone who survived a divorce as a child knows, the essential experience of it for the kids is the destruction of your parents’ ability to be parents at the precise moment when the whole familial structure is also disintegrating. Who do you go to – your father, who wants you to “just understand that this is who he is,” or your mother, who hates your father’s guts and wants you to do the same? Your siblings, who are trying to take or not take sides? It was so common it was almost the paradigmatic experience for Gen-Xers.
The extraordinarily high numbers of Boomers in therapy should have offered us a retrospective clue: although nobody was willing to say so, people often experience guilt, anguish and low self-esteem when they’re DOING SOMETHING THAT’S OBVIOUSLY WRONG.
And yes, I do know I have issues. I’m dealing with them by trying to be a good father and a faithful husband. That’s my therapy. And it’s the best part of my life.
In my family, it’s easy to assign blame: I think all of my shortcomings are my own fault, and my brother agrees that his are my fault, too.
All I know is that if this guy catches on, I’m going to have a hell of a time separating the Furedians from the Freudians.
Somebody—I think it was William James a hundred years ago—took Rousseau to task for being voyeurstic in his memoirs (written in the late 1800’s).
This kind of lit is certainly not new. The problem with it is that it doesn’t go anywhere. “Here’s a list of all the horrifying ways that life can go wrong: okay, we’re done now, thanks for reading.” In that respect it’s a little like true crime books. They titillate and they fascinate because they are so ugly, but they don’t really add anything. I don’t mean that people shouldn’t read or enjoy such stuff, to each his own. But I am someone who prefers fiction or autobiography to actually provide me with an insight, or a connection, or a concept that I didn’t have before.
I like to wallow.
My take on Misery Memoirs is that people who’s lives have been or are relatively sheltered are drawn to them, because, if you have lived a miserable life, you don’t need to wallow in such for entertainment. Much like Soap Operas.
The whole point of the genre is that there’s nowhere to go. Assigning blame is the fix, and if that’s not enough for you then you’re probably the one to blame for the problems of the people around you.
You unreasonably demanding bastard, you.
Yeah, the flower children weren’t to keen on acknowledging that their groove required a lot of bullshit to get the flowers to grow.
I find personal responsibility to be much more liberating. If I did it, it’s my fault. If you did it, it’s your fault. Soyou can control the amount of BS you have to deal with with your own actions.
The problem that I see with the ‘misery memoir’ is that it apes much of the post WWI fiction.
Misery, misery, misery, oops – the protagonist fails horribly. End of story.
I started to hate Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all the rest of the Great Twentieth Century Authors when I was in high school and put the finishing touches on that hate in college.
/sarc on/ Thanks for all of the misery, fellows. I’m glad to see that is all you are capable of writing about, or can someone actually write a story that is enjoyable to read instead of one where you want to slap the bejesus out of the characters while yelling at them to start acting like adults? No? You can’t? Then looks like your stuff is off my reading list. Thanks for trying. /sarc off/
Oh? what’s that? I’m raving again? I’ll stop now.
Growing up in Minnesota, I’ve occasionally tried to wrap my head around the idea that Lewis’ Main Street and Keillor’s Lake Wobegon are, in fact, the same place.
But that makes my brainmeats hurt, so I stop.
Nanonymous:
There’s an entire genre of gen-x music dedicated to the pain and loss associated either with divorce or an absent father. Its really quite remarkable. Amazing, even. I remember watching a video for one such song (can’t remember the artist or song title) and just being blown away about what a complete cry of pain it was. Just visceral, the way this singer was just screaming out his pain about dad just up and walking.
Oh, yeah. The Temptations.
Papa was a rollin’ stone…
Might just be me, but I would think writing misery porn would be more cathartic than reading it. Reading it just seems depressing, and I would think particularly so if one also lived it. But perhaps some people like to wallow in self-pity the way our troll Kathy likes to wallow in her imaginary swamp of platitudes.
“and when he died, all he left me was alone.”
Oh, I wouldn’t call Kathy a troll. She at least tries to engage in reasonable dialog without ad hominems and junk. That she has a hard time answering direct questions is not her fault. She probably went to college and majored in the Humanities, where they don’t expect intellectual rigor.
BECAUSE OF THE PATRIARCHY!
I don’t know that I would go so far as to say reasonable in terms of content, but in form, OK. So there’s that, I guess.
She’s doing what you see a lot of people who don’t actually think things through do, which is when someone leads them close to the conclusion to which their thoughts inevitably lead, they balk and stop in their intellectual tracks. This unwillingness to confront the sum of one’s ideas seems particularly evident in the trolls that have, well, trolled around these parts for as long as I’ve been hanging around.
Fred: Wouldn’t surprise me if you were thinking of Everclear’s “Father Of Mine.” Art Alexakis didn’t live through exactly what he describes in the lyrics, but he knew a lot of Gen-X kids who did – so it was rather easy for him to write the song. The story was familiar.
PS to Jeff: What did you think of Agatha Christie’s storytelling style, as opposed to Poe’s or Conan Doyle’s? Seems to me that she left a lot of clues in the open, so she couldn’t be accused of playing unfairly with the audience a la the Holmes stories…
Jacob—been a long time since I read AC. Would have to look at it again anew to comment intelligently on her style, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were correct.
Poe, too, left many of his clues out in the open, but what was magical is that he did it by using plays on “words”—or, more specifically, then tension between a word used as referent in the story context, and that same sign used as a referent to a clue to solve the puzzle, but only if you applied the signified that didn’t specifically fit in the story context.
Puzzles. Which is why his detective would frequently “reveal” his methods through a cloud of cigar smoke.
This is because if they did, they know they’d have to change their convictions and people hate having to do that.
Also, am I invisible, or is it just really hard to get attention here if one’s a non-trolling newbie?
Pellegri–
Welcome. Glad to have you here. You’re not being ignored. It’s just that it’s Tuesday, and you haven’t said anything stupid yet.
With respect to Jacob’s question, Jeff – what do you think of John Dickson Carr? His characters are very formulaic (cookie-cutter from book to book) but I always thought he laid out the clues honestly in the text. Two of his stories, “The Gilded Man” and “He Wouldn’t Kill Patience” I figured out how it was done, but only in the former did I guess who was the villian before the denoument.
He was a big fan of Conan Doyle, and took some umbrage at Doyle’s embrace of spiritualism in the early twentieth century. A lot of his stories had a ghost story element to them (both the Dr. Fell and the Sir Henry Merrivale series), which I thought was interesting as it added a twist to the detective story. I think he was a fan of Sheridan LeFanu (sp?), but I only read one collection of Lefanu, so I can’t be sure about the influence, and that was a long time ago.
My pardon; me rambling again.
A good and necessary duty. Ain’t easy either. Doesn’t get much public attention or praise – But you are right about it being a great part of life.
Oprah hides her face at this point (Won’t they just let “A Million Little Pieces” go!)
Don’t worry, Pellegri; if you said something monumentally stupid – balloon fence stupid – you’d be noticed real quick. And yes, there is such a thing as ‘bad attention’ – as a review of AC-130 gunship video will demonstrate.
It’s just that the level of most of the commenters here is so high (See: Ric Locke) that getting a return comment from anyone is rare and a joy. It doesn’t mean that what you wrote wasn’t read and processed; it just means that the other commenter doesn’t have anything to add or nothing to counter.
Welcome; all here welcome the civil and the honest.
Oh! Major John, my brother has an article up at the Small Wars Journal – “You have Hate: Web Based Teror”.
I thought you might be interested, but since the shut-down I didn’t know how to contact you.
Here’s the link.
I hope that link works.
Mikey —
Haven’t read Carr. Have read the gothic stuff you reference, though. I prefer American Southern gothic, like Flannery O’Connor.
Will have to check out Carr, though. My pick up some of Roger Simon’s stuff, too, while I’m at it.
Oh, and welcome, Pellegri!
McGehee hit on a major point – the fix, the “conclusion” is assigning blame.
If your worldview is all victims and victimizers, when you see someone who isn’t a victim you can assume they’re a villain.
Kind of explains the left’s reaction when someone goes “off the reservation.”
Anyway, on to more important things. After a short period of frustrated learning as a wee baby boy, I was always a fast reader. Fast readers often digest a short story after they’re done anyway, so it mattered less that Doyle “gave out” less.
That and it was harder to figure the answer, so I didn’t get bored and quit in the middle (boy, was I a brat or what?).
I didn’t stick to mystery, sidling off to sci-fi and fantasy for my escapism.
Jeff – Carr is for the Dr. Fell series, and for the ‘historical crimes’ novels. ‘Carter Dickson’ is for the H.M. stuff (the later ones are kinda Wodehousian in the humor). I think he had one under the name ‘Carr Dickson’ which (IIRC) funded his honeymoon to Europe.
I’ve never read Flannery O’Connor, and I’m not much of a gothic horror person, but the LeFanau stuff was good to crib from when I was a camp counselor. Any source of good, low-impact, horror stories to scare the bejebuss out of the kids and keep them inside at night was a boon to us – and the hook-man story (first heard it in 1977 when I was eleven) gets old.
But a ghost regiment that used to be stationed at Fort Milford right near here? And on some nights they march through looking for recruits?
Heh, that’s good.
Merovigin – I did the fantasy stuff for escapism, too. Tolkien, Moorcock, Heinlein. I just liked the mysteries because there was a challenge the author put down. “I’ll try to fool you – see how I can.” At least, that was the pre WWII mysteries. Most post WWII is just a blood – you know who the bad guy is, will the detective get there in time? A thriller is fun, but don’t call it a mystery.
Plus, the pre-WWII stuff (and pre-WWI) like Saxe Rohmer (sp?) and H. Rider Haggard is fun because a world is opened up – we see these people in photographs, but what did they actually do and talk about and read for fun? By reading this kind of cheap fiction, you get a window into who these people were, and why they acted as they did. Not what the critics decided is an ‘important work’ but what did the population buy, and who were they?
My brother has written down a lot of stories that mom and dad have told him, but to understand where they stood when those stories were real events just starting to unfold? You have to look at these kind of stories and entertainment to see what was popular, and understand that because it was popular, this family story would not have unfolded as it did.
I’m rambling again.
My last tonight –
If you read “Ivanhoe” you can understand the charge of the light brigade at Balclava. And why it was so powerful an image – Horsemen on the heights; an entrenched enemy before you; death awaits you if you descend; but where will honor and glory be? Shrinking here, safe from the fight? Or forward, into certain death? “We few, we gallant few; we band of brothers”. Forward! We strike for Honor! And Glory! And Chivalry! We strike for Queen and Country! Forward! And let any who holds back be cursed from this day forth!
Forward!
Think of the US Civil War; and it seems not too foreign at all.
Ahh, thank you for the warm welcomes! And I figured after posting that might actually be the case.
Balloon fence. Sounds kinky.
One of the things I love about this site is you don’t have to wade through hundreds of annoying cheerleading or snark posts to get to the meat, people generally don’t bother unless they actually have something to say.
Hell, you just described half of Everclear’s catalog.
On a serious note, it can be argued that divorce and its associated fallouts will probably be the baby boomers’ most significant contribution to American culture. Hopefully they’ll remember that when Gen-Xers start taking over Congress and begin cutting their Social Security payments.
Which, now that I think of it, is a fair description of the method similarly employed by Christie and Chesterton – the merest word may become important; a certain turn of phrase used by a character, even a casually tossed-off piece of description in the text, can go from zero to signifier with severe abruptness. You can look back and realize that Poirot or Miss Marple or Fr. Brown don’t make abductive leaps on sheer whim, as it seems Holmes might; the information that led them to the solution was right in your face the whole time, but you didn’t realize that it was important. One must pay attention to the words at all times, as absolutely anything can become a clue in retrospect.
And it’s this lack of exactitude in understanding the words of others that leads to certain social problems – I want to link this back to the whole misery-porn angle, but I’m having trouble finding a good point of intersection, and I’m writing this at work anyway so I’ve got a lot of other things on my mind.
The literature of the disintegrating family.