Remember me
Dave Pelzer’s book, A Child Called ‘It’ – about his utterly miserable, abuse-ridden Californian childhood in which he claims to have been stabbed, burned, starved, imprisoned and forced to eat ammonia, dog faeces and vomit by his evil mother who loathed him so much she could not use his name – became a global hit in 1995.
It sold more than five million copies and made Pelzer, now 64, into a very wealthy man.
The book also kick-started the incredibly lucrative phenomenon of ‘misery memoirs’ that went on to dominate the bestseller lists in the Noughties.
While these books made a lot of people very rich, the controversial nature of their content sparked many angry allegations.
The suffering recounted in so much excruciating detail by the authors who followed Pelzer on to the ‘mis lit’ gravy train was criticised for being either made up, stolen from others’ lives or, at the very least, exaggerated wildly.
The millions of readers who lapped up this awfulness also found themselves in the firing line. Far from being viewed as empathetic souls, they were often accused of being sadistic voyeurs who revelled in the sadness.
And literary success would ultimately lead to neither long-term happiness nor redemption for the writers.
Last week, in an interview with The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine 30 years after the publication of his first book, Pelzer claimed that his obsessive sharing had cost him dearly.
Dave Pelzer kick-started the incredibly lucrative trend of writing so-called misery memoirs
Read More I was a child called 'It'. 30 years on, this is what happened after my mother's abuse: DAVE PELZER
After A Child Called ‘It’, he wrote three more memoirs – The Lost Boy, A Man Named Dave and The Privilege Of Youth – about his unbelievably dismal childhood. And, while they brought him the fame and fortune, they also killed off two marriages.
His revelations shattered relationships with close family members who had a rather different take on his childhood memories (and his decision to share them) and fed an unhealthy obsession with spreading his message of salvation to, well, anyone who’d pay to listen.
He is not alone. On closer inspection, it seems that many like him – who have drowned us in a torrent of their suffering, sadness and record-breaking book sales – have paid for their over-sharing, with lawsuits, social ostracism, family estrangement, loneliness and more. Others have simply styled it out, shut their ears and enjoyed the cash.
Frank McCourt: Angela’s Ashes (1996)
Author Frank McCourt caused controversy with his childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes
McCourt’s heart-wrenching account of his grim childhood in the slums of Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s was probably the most miserable and successful ‘poverty porn’ ever written.
Published in 1996 when he was 66, it won a Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and was turned into a Hollywood film directed by Alan Parker with Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson starring.
But it also lost him a lot of friends back home in Limerick, which he described as ‘a terrible place, a backwater’, and caused huge rifts among the McCourt family.
Because McCourt did not stint on any details, covering everything from the rain-soaked tenement slum where the whole family slept in one bed and shared a fetid, crawling loo with their neighbours to the death of three of his six siblings.
His father’s rabid alcoholism. The hunger, cold bare feet and rags for clothes. And the grim ailments of poverty – eyes dripping with pus and black teeth. All of it so relentlessly awful that, as one critic wrote, it ‘makes Bleak House look like a Marx Brothers movie’.
And to be fair, most of it was true. The dead siblings, his drunken father, the eye infections.
But not quite all. After the book came out, the Limerick Leader published a photograph showing the youthful McCourt and his younger brother Malachy, smiling and dressed in extremely smart scout uniforms. Another photo showed their mother Angela, surprisingly plump and smiley given all that grinding hunger.
And the locals were furious. Once, signing books at a shop in Limerick, McCourt was confronted by a furious customer who ripped up Angela’s Ashes, declaring: ‘You’re a disgrace to Ireland, the Church and your mother!’
But McCourt, who died in 2009 aged 78, always insisted he’d simply written it as he remembered it as a boy.
And while he rattled through wives, he very much enjoyed the fame, the massive royalties, an apartment on New York’s upper East Side and a luxurious home in Connecticut, where Dustin Hoffman and Arthur Miller were neighbours – and simply brushed any criticism and angry family members away.
James Frey: A Million Little Pieces (2003)
James Frey was publicly roasted by Oprah Winfrey after A Million Little Pieces was debunked
At first, Frey’s sentimental memoir of addiction, prison and redemption received a mixed reaction. One critic hailed it, ‘The War and Peace of addiction’, but others were less keen, repelled by the relentless gruesome details about shooting up and soiling himself, the ‘childish’ style and the inkling that something didn’t quite ring true.
But then, in 2005, it was picked as an Oprah’s Book Club selection, topped the New York Times Bestseller list for 15 weeks and became the USA’s best-selling book of the year – after Harry Potter – and Frey was flying high.
Until in January 2006, The Smoking Gun – a website which puts up legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots – published an article called A Million Little Lies after a six-week investigation into Frey’s real life and it all came crumbling down.
Because it turned out his memoir was chock full of fabrications. Yes, he’d been drunk, taken drugs and done a spot of shoplifting – but then so have lots of others. And sadly, he hadn’t done a three-month stint in prison – despite all the gruesome details. Or had a girlfriend called Lily who hung herself.
And everything else was so grotesquely exaggerated that perhaps the line in the book where he says, ‘lying became part of my life’ should have been in bold font.
Needless to say, Oprah went bananas – having presented it all as truth to her book club – and invited him on the show for a public roasting, where Frey claimed to have been ‘so deluded I made up my memoirs’.
Happily for him, controversy – and the truth – simply bounced off his very thick skin. And book sales didn’t falter.
He told one interviewer: ‘I’ve never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.’
And he went on to write several more books which received appalling reviews – ‘Remarkably boring’ – but became bestsellers, set up a ‘fiction factory’ to help other writers churn out commercial children’s fiction and became a successful businessman cum literary media mogul.
In 2019, he was even immortalised in artist-turned-filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film of A Million Little Pieces, starring her husband Aaron.
It was panned by the critics. But Frey didn’t care. Because he’s rich and famous and he’s still got a (truthful) memoir up his sleeve if he ever fancies writing it.
Misha Defonseca: Surviving With Wolves (2005)
Misha Defonseca, real name Monique De Wael, eventually admitted her story was fake in 2008
Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves was hailed as a truly extraordinary work – ‘Schindler’s List meets The Jungle Book’ – when it was published in 2005.
And it was. Not just because it involved a six-year-old girl’s 1,900-mile, four-year trek, on her own, across Europe, to find her missing parents during the Second World War.
Or because she was given shelter by a pack of wolves who treated her as their cub. Or that she killed a Nazi officer in self-defence. But because, yes, you guessed correctly, it was completely made up by a middle-aged woman called Monique De Wael from Massachusetts.
Doubts first arose in 2007 when zoologists questioned whether wild wolves would ever have treated a six-year-old girl as a cub, as she claimed.
A bit more digging revealed Misha’s parents were not resistance fighters and that, during the four years she’d supposedly spent crossing Europe from Belgium to the Ukraine, she’d actually been living with her granny in a flat in Brussels. She wasn’t even Jewish, for goodness sake.
But that all emerged after the book became a huge hit, sparking a French film adaptation and a £10millon award in her favour against her US publisher for allegedly withholding royalties and not doing enough to market the book.
It was only in 2008 that she finally admitted she’d made it all up to block out the unhappy memories of her real childhood.
And after all the hoo-ha – and a demand in 2014 for the repayment of the £10million – she burrowed down to live quietly in Holliston, Massachusetts, with her very loyal husband, Maurice. She has always insisted: ‘It’s my story. It’s not the real reality, but it’s my reality, my way of surviving.’
And she refused point blank to co-operate with Netflix on a 2021 documentary of her story, Misha And The Wolves.
Kathy O’Beirne: Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell Inside The Magdalen Laundries (2005)
Kathy O’Beirne's account of torture by her father was denounced by seven of her ten siblings
Detailing a ‘hell’ of sexual abuse and beatings – first at home and then inside a Catholic institution for fallen women – O’Beirne’s book was vivid, monstrous, page-turningly awful and sold more than 400,000 copies.
She claimed to have been tortured by her labourer father, experimented on in a psychiatric hospital and raped by at least four priests and a policeman.
And if that wasn’t enough, there was also a spell in a Magdalen laundry, one of Ireland’s notorious Church-run homes for ‘fallen women’, where, aged 14, she claims to have given birth to a daughter, Annie, who died aged ten. The book was so traumatic that, at the time, one reviewer wrote: ‘Her story is so horrific, it is almost unbelievable.’
Sadly, this was spot on.
The year after it was published, seven of O’Beirne’s ten siblings denounced her account of horrific torture by her father in court. It turns out she was not adopted, there was no record of her ever attending the Magdalen laundry, or of her having a baby when she was 14.
Rubbish though they were, O’Beirne’s allegations were damaging. They not only fuelled Ireland’s obsession with clerical sex abuse, they tore her own family apart and wrecked the final years of Fr Fergal O’Connor, the founder of homeless hostel Sherrard House, whom she’d accused of raping her in the 1970s.
In fact, poor O’Connor was so riddled with arthritis when the alleged crimes took place that he was unable to even shake hands, let alone attack someone. The investigation into him took a full year, exonerating him just two days before his death.
O’Beirne died in 2019, still fighting with her family.
Constance Briscoe: Ugly (2006)
Constance Briscoe became a barrister but was jailed for 16 months in 2014 and disbarred
In this harrowing 431-page account of a loveless childhood, Briscoe details how her mother systematically abused her – beating her with a stick for wetting the bed, starving her and calling her a ‘dirty little whore’,
At one stage, Briscoe was so desperate she took herself off to social services and tried to get taken into care. When that failed, she was so suicidal she swallowed bleach ‘because it kills all known germs and my mother always told me I was a germ’.
Eventually, when she was 13, her mother simply moved out, leaving her to fend for herself with no gas, electricity or food. But, somehow, Constance found the courage to overcome her terrible start in life, applied herself to her studies, went to university, took a degree in law, became a barrister and underwent extensive cosmetic surgery to change her looks.
When it came out in 2006, the book did not go down at all well with her mother, who sued for libel, claiming the events were entirely made up. But after a ten-day hearing at the High Court in London in 2008, Constance was completely vindicated.
In a final unexpected twist, Briscoe was jailed for 16 months in 2014 for perverting the course of justice by leaking information to a journalist in R v Huhne and Pryce – the infamous speeding-points scandal involving the former MP Chris Huhne and his wife Vicky Pryce. She was also disbarred and removed from the judiciary.