I fell down a Google hole

And learned all about the misery lit of the early 00s. Also: LiLo's new Netflix era and why I think she's in on the joke

I spend an inordinate amount of time down Google holes. My husband says that my two major topics of conversation (aside from child-related logistics, which is 99% of all conversation) are things with design faults and what I’ve been deep-diving on Google. What you can rightfully glean from this is that I have an anal attention to detail and I am insatiably curious about random, tangential things that have absolutely no relevance to my life at that time.

I was thinking about the genre misery lit the other day (sometimes called ‘misery porn’ or ‘trauma porn’) and fell down a deep dark Dave Pelzer Google hole - which you are now going to join me on. For those of you unfamiliar, Dave Pelzer is the author of A Child Called It (and 8 subsequent books), a memoir of his horrendously abusive childhood, which was a massive phenomenon in the late 90s. It was published in 1995, the year before Frank McCourt’s novel, Angela’s Ashes - also a big sad vibe - and by 2001, it had sold 3 million copies worldwide.

I read it in 1998, aged 11. I can still remember standing near the exit of the library, reading it, because I didn’t want to wait until I got home. Arguably, it was not an appropriate book for a pre-teen to read, but I was precocious, with a predilection for gory stories like this. (When I went to Colorado to visit my aunt, I become fascinated with the strange and tragic story of JonBenét Ramsay, a 6-year-old child beauty pageant queen (much was made of the pageant part) who was found dead in her family basement in Boulder, in 1996 - and whose story was covered in revoltingly salacious detail for years by the National Enquirer etc.)

The sheer volume of books I would get out of the library at one time meant that my mother could never really get a handle on what I was reading and anyway, even if she’d felt compelled to do so, I’d have been furious if she’d tried to censor my reading and just hidden books up my jumper. So yes, possibly too young to read the book and definitely too young to realise that there was a wider phenomenon in the late 90s at play - in publishing, movies, fashion, celebrity - of gore and sleaze and vulgarity. A fascinating pulsating supernova that manifested differently across the different strands of media.

America was in a moral crisis in the late 90s, swinging back to the purity myth (hence the country’s obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) after Clinton’s public affair with Monica Lewinsky. (The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of The American Libido is a fascinating book btw on Clinton, viagra, the creation of the thong and how all these things coalesce. I won’t even begin to get into Jonathan Aitken and the Tory sleaze era.)

But I had no idea, until my recent deep-dive, how prevalent and divisive the misery lit canon had been in publishing in the late 90s and early 00s. In magazine and books publishing, there was an obsession with not just sex, but sexual abuse and more generally, trauma. In 2001, 30% of the bestseller chart was made up of books about childhood abuse. According to The Guardian, Waterstones even created a special category for them all in store, titled ‘Painful Lives’. (Which no longer appears to exist.) Our Little Secret (2001), Don’t Tell Mummy (2004), Damaged (2006), Silent Sisters (2006), Daddy’s Little Girl (2007). It is not that these stories should not be told - but the titles are all so grim and that’s before you get to the book jackets, which I deliberately haven’t inserted pics: tiny porcelain doll faces and wobbled cracked font. It feels like there was an almost Victorian appetite for depravity at the start of the new millennium - and misery lit fit right in.

A Child Called It, as everyone who has read it knows - and I’m intrigued, here, given the variety of age in my own newsletter readership, how many of you have read it - is a truly harrowing read. Details, which I won’t relay here, stay with the reader for life. But I hadn’t thought about these books in years. And it was only last week, that I learned, with mouth dropped open, that Pelzer’s books - the most successful of the entire genre - were super controversial.

Firstly, because they are deemed to be badly written. Pelzer’s publisher said that A Child Called It appeals to people who don’t usually read books. Nothing wrong with that (the same can be said of Colleen Hoover) but that kind of statement, incidentally, always generates ire. The publishing industry cares most about readers, not the person who buys one book a year, in the airport. “Pelzer rarely uses one word when five will do”, writes Geraldine Bedell in a squeamishly titled piece, ‘Child abuse as entertainment’. For three years, Pelzer struggled to sell the book in the UK. There was a belief that what worked there (America) would never work here.

It turns out the publishing industry was categorically wrong. As of 2007, Pelzer had sold 3.5m books in the UK alone. The appeal, the psychologist Oliver James told The Guardian, is either as a form of “grotesque and aberrant erotica” or “downward social comparison”. Both options are pretty grim, the first notably more so.

I can’t remember the writing style, I’d have to re-read it, but I would say that a lot of content-driven memoirs are not spectacularly well-written. I’ve read three in the last three months that have eye-popping subject matter but the writing is no great shakes. But the reason why people were so furious about Pelzer’s memoir, is not just because his books were dubiously written and not just because they were staggeringly successful, but because - and here’s the gnarly part - they were suspected to be untrue.

11-year-old me needs to sit down for a moment.

This 2002 interview in The NYT, Dysfunction for Dollars, is an uncomfortable read for many reasons - but namely, because of the evidence it gathers to suggest that A Child Called It is fiction.

I spoke with one of Pelzer's younger brothers, Stephen, 40, who was stricken with Bell's palsy as a child and whose speech is slightly slurred. Stephen denies his mother abused David or burned him or forced him to eat dog feces. ''Please!'' he says. ''That never happened.'' As a witness to the stabbing incident, Stephen says: ''I saw mom cutting food when David grabbed her arm and got a small cut from the knife. There wasn't even any blood, yet he screamed, 'Mommy stabbed me!'''

Stephen says David wasn't ostracized from the family, but that ''he was very close to me and Robert,'' the oldest brother. ''We were 'The Three Musketeers.' But David had to be the center of attention. He was a hyper, spoiled brat.''

Okay, but that’s just one brother. Hold on -

Pelzer's grandmother, Ruth Cole, 92, remembers him as a ''disruptive kid, only interested in himself, with big ideas of grandeur.'' She says he bragged that celebrities, like Chuck Yeager, would be at his and Patsy's wedding. ''But it was just a few family members in the garage,'' she says. ''His books should be in the fiction section.''

But that’s just one grandmother!

But there’s more. Lots more. The journalist suggests that there are many things that Pelzer has lied about. Pelzer says his book was nominated for a Pulitzer - but the book was one of 800 books submitted to the Pulitzer committee and anyone can submit a book. You could submit a grocery list, if you felt like it. Pelzer says A Child Called It was taught at Harvard - but Harvard says that never happened. Pelzer has been on the bestseller lists for 3 years - but reportedly he buys thousands of his own books from bookshops, to sell on at his speaker events, a technique known as ‘back-of-the-room selling’. Meanwhile, Pelzer spends 270 evenings a year, speaking about his abuse.

Later, Pelzer tells the journalist: “Everyone sees things differently”.

Phewf.

That’s one way of putting it.

Much has been written about the ‘trauma porn’ of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (which I loved, but wouldn’t be able to re-read) but it’s only a patch on A Child Called It, which has the added impact of being based on a true story. It made me realise that had A Little Life been published 20 years earlier - in 1995 - there would have been much less backlash. Because A Little Life, regardless of content, is extremely well-written, and a lot of the criticism of A Child Called It appears to be because it is not.

I know that mid-millennials like me have an absolute obsession with the late 90s and early 00s, but that’s not just because I am distressed that Size 00 dressing has returned (low-slung jeans, thongs, tiny cami tops with no bra - all clothes basically that celebrate an emaciated form) to compliment Ozempic. It’s because there were so many fascinating shifts in the social and cultural landscape, that make it such a fertile time to re-visit. Like, how was there a time when 30% of the bestseller list was made up of books about child abuse?

I have no idea if any of Pelzer’s books are true - the evidence against them being so is compelling, although the tone of some of the profiles is uncomfortably snooty and victim-blaming - but I am absolutely desperate to talk to anyone who worked in publishing at that time, so I can ask: Did it feel particularly prurient? Did you hate misery lit or were you, in fact, one of the people who published it? How did then industry segue out of it (did they segue out? Do those books still sell?)

Also I really want to know if anyone else read A Child Called It back then and had no idea of the contested context around it, until they read this - and how it’s made them feel.

Meanwhile, I’ll be down my Google hole, eyes agog at all the things I never knew, aged 11.

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BITS

The concept of the personal brand was coined by a management guru, Tom Peters, in his 1997 piece for Fast Company, ‘The Brand Called You’. I came to it through another piece on Vox and a little Googling - naturally - tells me that the piece was era-defining in modern marketing. (Here’s a recent interview with Peters.) “Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc.” Can you believe this was written 25 years ago!? What a soothsayer. Kylie Jenner was still in utero!

The examples of a branded identity in 1997, are amazing: Levi’s jeans, a Champion sweatshirt, a Starbucks cup. Very Friends. Aside from a North Face puffa (guilty), what would be the most basic branded signifiers now? Answers in the Comment section, please.

Thanks to Kate Manne’s rigorous piece about Oprah’s sticky history with the weight loss industry, I learned the Latin phrase, post hoc ergo propter which refers to the act of claiming correlation between two non-sequiturs, merely because one thing came after the other. For instance: “I saw Georgia. I was late. I was late because I saw Georgia.” Would look gorgeous on a pillow.

I recently trialled Extra’s watermelon flavour gum and while it cannot hold a candle to my favourite sweet of all time I would still recommend it for the chewbaccas among you.

Speaking of trying new things, I decided to look up brain worms and found this story about an Australian woman who had an 8cm worm removed from her brain last summer. I cannot un-know it and now you can’t either.

If you enjoyed Sweetbitter, I hard recc this interview with Stephanie Danler on Colleen Crivello’s newsletter, Double Take. You don’t even need to be a fan of Sweetbitter, tbh. Danler is admirably candid on all sorts of things: having an affair, being a mistress, not wanting kids and having kids, resisting the fairytale narrative that comes with a successful book.

“Years later, when I was book-touring for Sweetbitter, people asked what it felt like to have my first book be a success. I’d say, ‘It feels a lot like failing.’ I can still feel what it felt like to be broke and living with nine roommates deep in Bushwick. I can still feel what it felt to have hurt a man I loved in a way that was almost inhumane. That’s what I think about when I think about Sweetbitter’s success.”

Like everyone I know, I am obsessed with the Willy Wonka scam in Glasgow. Apparently the founder of the event company, Billy Coull - now famous for Fyre Festing his way through Roald Dahl’s most famous book - self-published 17 Chat-GPT written novels on Amazon last year. So much to unpack here - seventeen? And yet, that does not mean we need a documentary about it, Channel 5. Less than one short month has passed and we have Wonka: The Scandal That Shocked Britain. (I’m not sure shock was the primary reaction, either.) If ever there were evidence that we are in a factual gold rush, this is it.

For anyone down Stockholm way, I really recommend Rashid Johnson’s exhibit Seven Rooms and a Garden at The Moderna Museet, where the contemporary artist’s own work interacts with the museum’s collection - it’s so clever and surprising and thoughtful. I was particularly moved by the his 2021 film, ‘Black and Blue’, where he films himself going about his day, highlighting the tension between private and public.

After years of sobbing and hyperventilating every time I encountered turbulence, my parents gifted me BA’s Flying with Confidence course for Christmas. A few weekends ago and with enormous amounts of loathing and trepidation, I arrived at a corporate hotel in Heathrow. For the first 2 hours, I was mortified. After 4 hours, I tried to leave because I was bored (I’m terrible at sitting still for hours on end.) After 8 hours, I was fascinated. Did you know that there are 1.2m people in the air at any given time? That roughly 120,000 commercial flights take off every single day? And after 10 hours and a 40 min flight with my fellow scaredy-cats, I was intensely moved. My neighbour had not been on a flight for 16 years! Another guy just sat there going fucking hell. Fucking hell. FUCKING HELL! with the biggest grin on his face.

The course is expensive and exhausting, but if you are scared of flying I cannot recommend it more. (Just take loads of snacks and an open mind.) I flew to Sweden last weekend and for the first time ever, I looked out the window at the fluffy clouds and calmly marvelled at the efficacy of flight. A dream.

I started watching The Gentleman purely because my husband told me I wouldn’t like it and - ha! - I’m really enjoying it. Guy Ritchie’s style isn’t always my vibe but it works well here - the snappy camera style and sweary quips and big leery titles. It’s also quite daft, which is something I always appreciate in everything and everyone (the chicken suit, Freddy’s entire character) and the casting is neat - Kaya Scodelario is delightful as the businesswoman of a cannabis operation. I’m only on episode 3, so DON’T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS.

On the subject of Netflix… I have a theory. Much has been written about how crap the streamer’s original movies are, notably those that include Lindsay Lohan. Her festive return to screen was dubbed the biggest Christmas turkey in years but it was also the most watched Christmas film on Netflix. And her new one, Irish Wish - dubbed “abysmal” and a “harbinger of doom” - is possibly… worse? I had a great time watching it, because I just laughed loads. To quote Kevin Maher, it is “genuinely terrible”, but it is also “oddly watchable”. Even the heinous wardrobe is delicious to me - why is LiLo dressed exclusively in tweedy shift dresses, like she is cosplaying Bunny MacDougal?

I think that LiLo, both star and exec producer, knows these films are terrible and leans into it. They are easy to make, widely (snark) watched and undoubtedly make her loads of wonga. She had a fucking terrible decade in the public eye - the likes of which many would and have struggled to come back from - so why not make a load of fun turkeys in utterly gorgeous locations and get paid well?

I know people get depressed about the existence of terrible movies like this but I don’t think they’re a sign that the apocalypse is coming or that entertainment is irreparably damaged. Sure, it’s no Mean Girls. But I’m happy for LiLo. If only because her movies make me howl with laughter - a real palate cleanser from actual life - and because her turkeys are what bring in the big bucks, so that Netflix can commission smaller, soulful, indie films that move and change us. Feel free to share your own theories (they’re written by Chat GPT/ LiLo is locked in a golden forever-deal, etc), they are most welcome here.

was the costume designer on acid?

Does this newsletter feel like a fever dream? Writing it did.

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A little bit of housekeeping to end with: Substack is changing at the rate of knots and there is now a Twitter-style Notes homepage and a DM inbox. The reason I joined Substack was for the bare bones format. I want to put out my newsletter and read newsletters I love, and that’s it. In the interests of sanity, I have decided to opt out of Notes, and DMs. (So if you message me on either, know that it’s not you - it’s me.) But I LOVE the Comments section and will always be up for a chat here 💫