BJ Silcox

It's a really great question.

In the 1980s, a strain of memoir started to emerge that became really strong in the mid-90s, that were these very honest, very earnest stories about abuse and suffering.

They were mostly sold not in bookstores, but in supermarkets.

They were marketed mostly to women.

And they were stories that were written by ordinary people who'd suffered extraordinary trauma.

And

The misery memoir term was a kind of a pejorative term that publishers attached to them because they were a little bit embarrassed about selling what they thought were sort of embarrassing stories that belonged more in therapists' offices than in people's hands.

But they really resonated with people.

They resonated because they're stories that had never been told before, stories of child abuse, stories of surviving profound sexual abuse or physical trauma.

Absolutely.

And they were the ones that sort of crossed out of the dark sort of underground of books and into the bookstores and into the bestseller lists, the ones that were

you know, that got a lot of attention because they were beautifully written stories and they resonated far more widely and sort of crossed over into mainstream literary culture.

I think for a while, a long while, we've been in denial that there was any impact whatsoever.

We were, publishers particular, talked about misery literature like they were getting their hands dirty, like these were stories that didn't belong in bookshops.

But

Certainly the fact that they resonated so strongly with people and a good example of that is that one of the places they sold so strongly were in Ireland where child sexual abuse is something that was very closeted but was widespread and people wanted to talk about it and didn't have a way or a means to share their experiences.

And so this sense that openness about trauma and bravery about talking about trauma had kind of infiltrated popular culture and

started to infiltrate literary culture because literature is a mirror.

It reflects what we care about back to ourselves and the stories that we tell about ourselves.

So it's inevitable that it's turned up in our more prize-winning, highbrow literary culture.