Lives of loud desperation
Over at The Tyee, John Dolan has a long essay about the latest fake-memoir cases, Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves (Holocaust survivor escapes into the nurturing arms of a wolf pack) and Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences (South Central girl grows up running with the gangs). Dolan argues that the appeal of such books is their glamorization and exoticization of suffering:
Only now do stories about cold and hunger without happy magical endings become popular, because that form of suffering is, for most of us, a nice distraction from the actual sufferings we undergo.
And that actual suffering?
This new kind of indoor suffering, which does not involve physical violence or privation, is the suffering that drives authors to go to the huge effort and risk of making up tales of more glamorous forms of suffering. They do it because their kind of suffering is not recognized yet: the suffering of not being famous in a culture that values only a few famous people, with the rest reduced to adoring, starved spectators. The suffering of being one of those slavish spectators will be understood, I suspect, a century from now.
