BJ Silcox

And I had these questions about, as a reader, what was I meant to be doing with this information?

What was my purpose?

What was my role here?

Was I meant to be

Was I meant to be watching him suffer?

Was I meant to be empathizing?

Was I meant to be standing in for him?

What was I meant to be learning?

And I had all of these questions and I didn't know how to answer them.

And they haunted me for a long time.

And so a number of years went by and I had these questions sitting here about the ethics of readership.

And then I read Gabrielle Talent's novel this past summer and the same questions recurred.

And so I was prompted to write an article about it.

And when I started to ask questions of the people around me, I realised that a lot of people had been asking the same questions but didn't have a way of putting them into words, that the culture around us has sort of moved into a space where exploring suffering, engaging in it, in fact immersing ourselves in suffering has become a kind of authorial heroism and staring it down as a reader or a watcher of television or in movies has become a way in which we're sort of

morally engaging with our culture in order to to be a good moral citizen we have to to watch the suffering happen let's talk more about what it is that you're arguing because you're not saying that we shouldn't write about pain are you absolutely not and i think it's extraordinary that people can and that people do and i think it's important that people do we're often attracted to fictional depictions of trauma we're attracted to it on screen in things like

The Handmaid's Tale, we're attracted to it in books like A Little Life.

But often the misery literature genre, which was so derided by publishers when it first kind of emerged, is now blossoming in a way that's available to us, but often ignored at the expense of literary fiction that garners a lot of prizes and a lot of acclaim.

So that the real life accounts of women who've suffered extraordinary sexual abuse are

are not read at the expense of fictional accounts and so I was asking myself as a reader why is it that we go to fictional accounts rather than real accounts and so I was asking myself

What is it that we're asking from the books that we read as much as what those books are asking of us?