Mis lit: Is this the end for the misery memoir?

From The Daily Telegraph 05/03/2008

As two 'mis lit' memoirs destined for the bestseller lists are revealed to be works of fiction, Ed West reports on the almighty backlash against a classic of the genre
It was a childhood tale of woe that touched the public's heart. Kathy O'Beirne's 2005 memoir, Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries, painted a relentlessly grim picture of growing up in 1960s Ireland. Entitled Don't Ever Tell in Britain, it shifted 400,000 copies, making O'Beirne the second best-selling Irish non-fiction writer of all time, after Frank McCourt, whose Angela's Ashes had been no laugh-a-minute either.

A scene from the Magdalene Sisters, which helped fuel fascination with harsh laundries
O'Beirne told of being tortured by her labourer father, experimented upon in a psychiatric hospital, and raped by no fewer than four priests and a policeman. Then there was her spell in a Magdalene laundry, one of Ireland's notorious Church-run homes for "fallen women", where, aged 14, she gave birth to a daughter. A reviewer at the time wrote: "Her story is so horrific, it is almost unbelievable."
Which, upon reading the book, was the reaction of Hermann Kelly, a Derry-born journalist. "Alarm bells started ringing," he says. "Even in the introductory chapter, every single thing is black and white. If you were a betting man, the statistical probability of someone having so many terrible events in their life stretched credibility."

According to Kathy's Real Story, Kelly's exposé of O'Beirne's book, published in the UK next week, Don't Ever Tell is not so much misery memoir as a great work of fiction.
The key to O'Beirne's success was the public's fascination with the Magdalene laundries, which are to misery memoir writers what the SAS is to Andy McNab. Established in the 19th century and finally closed in 1996, the laundries, as depicted in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, were notorious for Dickensian harshness and cruelty. The nuns who ran them historically, according to Kelly, were "Catholic Frankensteins, or Daleks out to exterminate all signs of life and love".
O'Beirne wrote: "I was 12 years old and I had just been delivered to hell... the Devil himself could not have dreamed up a better hell than the Magdalene laundry."
Except that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of High Park have no record of O'Beirne; and they were certainly meticulous record-keepers. As Kelly says, their archives are "complete and so comprehensive that one woman's two-day admittance was recorded".
O'Beirne simply didn't exist in the files; the laundries did not admit girls as young as 13, or pregnant women. Even former Magdalene residents have said O'Beirne's account rings false. One former friend suggested O'Beirne had seen The Magdalene Sisters, and now "seems to think it's her".
In response, O'Beirne's co-writer, Michael Sheridan, could only say he spoke to a woman who remembers being in a Magdalene home with Kathy. "She died in a psychiatric hospital some time after we spoke," he said. "She is another victim, just like Kathy."
Nor is there any record of "Annie", O'Beirne's child who apparently died from bowel disease at the age of 10. She claims it was because the birth was hushed up. Kelly recently offered €1,000 to anyone who can find proof of Annie having existed. He does not expect to be getting out the chequebook any time soon.
Kelly's exposé could be the start of a widespread backlash against misery literature, a genre kick-started by Angela's Ashes in 1996, and which took off globally four years later with A Child Called It, Dave Pelzer's account of growing up with an alcoholic mother who beat, starved, stabbed, burnt and force-fed ammonia to him. "Inspirational memoirs", the polite term for this type of book, now account for nine per cent of the British book market, shifting 1.9 million copies a year and generating £24 million of revenue for the publishing industry. HarperCollins recently admitted to a 31 per cent increase in annual profits thanks to "mis lit".

"Mis lit" is not an entirely new invention. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed, published in 1836, suggested that the Sisters of Charity in Montreal were forced to have sex with the priests next door, who then baptised and strangled any offspring. Unable to distinguish reality and fantasy as a result of a brain injury as a child, Monk had never been in a nunnery. She was, in fact, a prostitute who had spent her early years in a Magdalene laundry. "At least she'd been in one," says Kelly, drily.

Read the full Telegraph piece..........