Misery loves company...and a good memoir

With LK Advani's memoirs, My Country, My Life set to hit stands on March 19, G Sampath takes a look at a genre taking the publishing world by storm, the Misery Memoir

If you've been secretly working on a novel, and hoping to sell it to a publisher abroad for an obscene advance, kindly delete your hope, and move your manuscript to the recycle bin.

And remember to empty your recycle bin immediately. For at least in the West, the fastest growing market today is not fiction, but memoirs. To be precise, a sub-category of memoirs called 'misery memoirs’.

The trend was started by Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), whose tale of childhood destitution was so powerfully moving that it moved millions of copies from bookshops to reader’s homes.

In the years since, as publishers realised that there was a market for misery, they fine-tuned the formula, whose one essential ingredient is some form of violent abuse, preferably in childhood.  As happened with chicklit, there began a flood of misery that has still not abated.   

However, while chicklit, originally a western publishing trend, has successfully caught on in the Indian market, the misery memoir hasn’t made an impact here. This is rather strange, considering that there is no dearth of misery in our country. 

So how do we account for this anomaly? According to Pramod Kapoor, managing director, Roli Books, the Indian psyche is different from the western one. "We are a very private people,” he says. “We don’t like to make our misery public just to make money out of it.”

That view does not tally with the experience of Saugata Mukherjee, commissioning editor, HarperCollins, India: “We keep getting manuscripts of what you might call misery memoirs, but they are all very poorly written.” 

Penguin’s editorial honcho Ravi Singh has an interesting theory. “Misery memoirs are written by people who haven’t had it easy in life. In India, this often means you haven’t had the privilege of education, in which case you wouldn’t be able to write books.” If Singh is right, the problem in India might well be the conjunction (or the lack thereof) of misery and ability.

But who exactly are the Indians with the greatest quantity of misery in their lives? NRIs who love their native land so much they’d rather write about it from a safe distance?

Academics with too much time on their hands? Or retired bureaucrats who couldn’t find a think tank to swim in? Brimming as these lives may be with exquisite misery, they may not be in the same class as, say, the cotton farmers in Vidharba, who are unlikely to seek salvation in a book deal. At least so far, they have preferred suicide over memoir-writing.

Who else is rich in misery in our country? Mukherjee offers a clue. “Most of the ‘misery manuscripts’ we receive are from women,” he says. As 50 Cent once said, “That don’t surprise nobody.” In fact, the two titles that crop up repeatedly when you mention ‘misery memoirs’ to Indian publishers are both by women: Reaching Out To The World by Baby Halder, the memoir of a domestic help, and Nalini Jameela’s Autobiography Of A Sex Worker.

However, despite these one-off hits, there is no sign of an explosion of Indian misery memoirs. “The Indian market is not yet ready for this kind of genre differentiation,” explains Singh.

But which ambitious writer would want to count on the Indian market anyway? “Till 20 years ago, Indian publishers didn’t even publish fiction by Indian writers. They only did educational books,” reminds Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan, the publisher of Baby Halder’s book.

But our authors, beginning with Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, did make it big in the West, and as a result Indian English fiction today has a market even in India!

The only problem that needs to be addressed is: how can a writer with no experience of misery produce a misery memoir? Not everyone is as fortunate as Dave Pelzer who, in A Child Called It, describes in fascinating detail how his mother force-fed him his own vomit, and rubbed his face in soiled nappies. If you weren’t lucky enough to be born to parents with such innovative child-rearing ideas, it’s always going to be tough.

But there is a way to untie the Gordian knot though: Just write, without any exaggeration, about how you killed your father and slept with your mother before being raped by your step-father at the age of 13, for which you took revenge by castrating him after drugging him. Margaret Jones went down that path in Love And Consequences — her memoir, about a childhood spent drug-running among Black gangs, was revealed last week to have been all made up.

Guess who told the told the whole world about her fraud? Her sister. Moral of the story: If you do eventually write a fake misery memoir, remember to leave no sister unkilled.
g_sampath@dnaindia.net