Ours has been called the age of the memoir; it would be more accurate to call it the age of autopathography. An autopathography is, literally, a work about one’s own illness, an autobiography that tells the story of an addiction, mental illness or some form of self-destructive behavior.
Also known in the publishing trade as misery lit, autopathography can be about addiction to alcohol (“Happy Hours,” “Dry”), pills (“Pillhead”), heroin (“Permanent Midnight”) or meth (“Tweaked”). There are also misery-lit memoirs on anorexia (“Wasted”), depression (“Prozac Nation”), bipolar disorder (“An Unquiet Mind”) and sex addiction (“Love Sick,” “The Surrender”).
Misery lit is everywhere these days. It has even infiltrated other well-established genres. It has been grafted onto the celebrity memoir and become a way for the lightweight celebrity to give himself or herself some gravitas (Marie Osmond’s and Brooke Shields’ memoirs on postpartum depression); for the sports star to add some intriguing darkness to his corporate- friendly persona (“Open,” by Andre Agassi); for the politician to add a little humanity and rehabilitate himself (Jim McGreevey’s coming- out memoir, “The Confession”).
It has also attached itself to the racial-consciousness memoir (“Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America,” by Scott Poulson-Bryant) and the foreign-correspondent memoir (“Hello to All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft and Peace,” by John Falk), even, for crying out loud, to cookbooks. In the introduction to “Damn Good Food,” Mitch Omer’s collaborator writes of Chef Omer’s sexual promiscuity, his bipolar disorder and his alcoholism: “We had to schedule work on this book around his second round in rehab and a court-ordered stint for driving under the influence, which he served in a Pine City, Minn., jail.”
In its elevation of the ordinary, its rejection of traditional privacies, its obsession with pathology, its exhibitionism masquerading as healing, and its score-settling masquerading as honesty, misery lit strongly resembles another popular contemporary form: reality TV.
Like reality TV, misery lit spares no detail. Its violations of decorum, its assault on its subjects’ innermost secrets are somehow a proof of its authenticity.
Its routine invasions of privacy are justified by misery-lit authors as being, “I don’t know, like, therapeutic.” (Lance Bass, formerly of ‘N Sync, about his coming-out memoir), or therapeutic’s New Age twin, “liberating,” (Toni Bentley, on her sexually explicit memoir, “The Surrender”).
Is it really catharsis?
The somewhat dubious therapeutic value of misery-lit memoirs is offset by other considerations. “Writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion famously remarked, and nowhere is this cynical precept more often brought home than in the response to these precocious autobiographies.
In recent years, numerous memoirs have been attacked by some of their subjects as being not just untruthful but cruel and exploitative. Witness Augusten Burroughs, Julie Myerson, even Martin Amis. Significant chunks of Amis’ precocious memoir “Experience” were devoted to the writer’s fatuous musings on the ghastly fate of his cousin Lucy Parrington, who was tortured and killed by the British serial murderer Frederick West (“When I think of Lucy being bound or restrained my nerves and membranes feel her moral force and its demand for release. . . .”).
Unsurprisingly, after “Experience” was published, Lucy Parrington’s relatives announced that Amis had barely known her and was exploiting her fate to sell his book.
Almost 40 years ago, the same issues were played out, not around a prose memoir but around, of all things, a collection of sonnets.
In America, misery lit has a distinguished pedigree in the realm of poetry. The works of poets John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and, above all, Robert Lowell drew on their struggles with mental illness and on intimate details of their own lives for their material.
There was perhaps something prophetic about the confessional work of these mad poets. The psychologist R.D. Laing saw the insane as the canaries in the cultural coal mine; he believed that they displayed pathologies that would soon manifest themselves in the culture at large.
The sonnet as misery lit
For example, when Lowell published his sonnet sequence “The Dolphin” (1973), which described his own mental breakdown and quoted from letters and private conversations with his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his current wife, Caroline Blackwood, his approach was still a novelty.
“Yet, why not say what happened” was the rationale given by Lowell in his poem, “Epilogue.” His critics weren’t so sure.
Not knowing she was witnessing the glorious birth of a new genre, Adrienne Rich, a fellow poet and former friend, wrote: “What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? . . . This is . . . a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, presumptuous (in balancing) injury done to others with injury done to (oneself).”
Rich’s attack resonates with questions that are even more relevant today: Does the posture of total frankness hide an aggressiveness toward others and a destructive narcissism? Does the need for self-revelation and self-display always trump the need for privacy?
In shows such as “Survivor” or the recent hit “Celebrity Rehab,” the participants welcome the camera, even as it appears to violate their privacy. The alternative — anonymity — is worse.
It is a sign of our deeply damaged notions of privacy and human dignity, notions that both reality TV and misery lit have had a hand in destroying, that our previous administration in Washington could pass the most sweeping and invasive surveillance laws in our history with remarkably little public protest.
Writers such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley saw that the breakdown of personal liberty would have to take place with the partial consent of the governed. They both understood that the total intrusion of the state in the private realm would have to be regarded by the individual not as a violation of his privacy but as welcome and necessary, perhaps as a relief from his intolerable loneliness.
John Broening is a freelance writer in Denver.
