Catherine Bennett on abuse memoirs as a genre…

In a really fine piece of survivor-ware, you’ll find something redemptive - yet convincing - on every page. As a child, Briscoe read The Little Princess and vowed never to give up. Now we can read Judge Briscoe’s horrifying memoirs and vow never to give up. Such - assuming that their appeal is not witless voyeurism - is the moral that makes these memoirs of true-life victimhood so compelling to readers of the Oprah persuasion that they have not just become a genre of their own, with a well-stocked misery section in Borders, but spawned a flourishing sub-genre: miserable true-life memoirs of questionable or contested veracity.