Misery Porn

Frank Furedi with a long, thoughtful essay excoriating the literary trend in misery memoirs and its potentially dire cultural effects. Some excerpts:

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.

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If victimisation within the family is pandemic, then quite clearly we should mistrust even those who are closest to us. The focus of our angst and anxiety should no longer be the alien stranger or criminal but our family relations, neighbours, friends, lovers and workmates. This new approach to everyday life has fundamentally redefined the way we are expected to relate to those who are closest to us physically and emotionally. ……..This is the message conveyed on a daily basis through books, TV and other forms of popular culture: that the family is a dangerous institution, and thus life itself must be pretty dense with risks, fear and distrust.

Popular culture retains a strain of respect for privacy and family life – yet here, too, powerful forces continually try to 'expose' the harmful deeds of toxic parents. Increasingly popular terms like the 'dark side of family life' invoke a sense of dread about private and thus invisible relations. ………..

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.

Worth reading in full. Via Arts and Letters Daily .