Misery literature

Misery literature, also called misery lit, misery porn, misery memoirs and trauma porn, is a literary genre dwelling on trauma, mental and physical abuse, destitution, or other enervating trials suffered by the protagonists or, allegedly, the writer (in the case of memoirs). While in a broad sense the genre is as at least as old as mass-market fiction (e.g., Les Misérables), the terms misery lit and misery porn are usually applied pejoratively to steamy potboilers, schlock horror, and lurid autobiographical wallows of dubious authenticity, especially those without a happy ending. Misery literature has also been proven to be a popular genre for literary hoaxes in which authors claim to reveal painful stories from their past.

Works in the genre typically—though not exclusively—begin in the subject's childhood, and very often involve suffering some mistreatment, physical or sexual abuse, or neglect, perpetrated by an adult authority figure, often a parent or guardian. These tales usually culminate in some sort of emotional catharsis, redemption or escape from the abuse or situation. They are often written in the first person. It is also sometimes called "pathography."

Helen Forrester was credited with inventing the misery memoir genre with the bestseller Twopence to Cross the Mersey in 1974. Critics such as Pat Jordan and Geraldine Bedell trace the beginning of the genre to A Child Called "It", a 1995 memoir by American Dave Pelzer, in which he details the abuse he claims to have suffered at the hands of his alcoholic mother, and two subsequent books which continue the story. Pelzer's three books—all recovery narratives dealing with his childhood-created considerable controversy, including doubt as to the veracity of the claims. While the books spent a combined total of 448 weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list, Pelzer acknowledges purchasing and reselling many thousands of his own books.

Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1992) and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) are seen by Shane Hegarty as seminal works establishing the genre.

Some critics position Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life (2015) within a lineage of trauma-focused literature that has dominated the past two decades — starting with the boom in misery memoirs in the early 2000s — where sensational personal narratives of abuse and neglect became bestsellers. They see the genre has evolved into literary fiction where pain and trauma are aestheticized rather than simply recounted, including autofictional works by authors like Karl Ove Knausgård, Sheila Heti, Garth Greenwell and others whose writings center on emotional suffering. They see the genre prizes the depiction of pain as a marker of artistic seriousness or moral depth.