History Main / MiseryLit

* Traci Lords, former underaged porn star, wrote a book about herself as the victim of child abuse at the hands of the porn industry that fits this trope. Growing up in terrible poverty? Check. AbusiveParents (and [[ParentalAbandonment lack of parents]])? Check. Sexual abuse? Yes (before the porn). Dashed hopes? Yes, of becoming a legitimate model when she posed for Penthouse at 15. More sexual abuse? Yes, porn as sexual abuse in and of itself for 3 years. Prostitution? Yes, "prostitution" in the form of pornographic movies. Drug addiction? Yes. UsefulNotes/VictimBlaming? Yes, in that anti-porn people dislike her for being in porn despite age, or pro-porn people who view her as a traitor who knew what she was doing the whole time, though no lawsuits due to the book by itself. Complete with the [[WhiteVoidRoom bleak white cover]] in the [[http://tinypic.com/r/2e4hvzt/6 revised version]]. Averted, in that rather than a mournful title, it has a punny double entendre ''"Underneath It All."''

* Miserable childhoods and horrendously abusive upbringings seem ''de rigueur'' for charismatic preachers and televangelists. It sometimes seems from the outside that there is an informal competition to claim bragging rights for the worst childhood ever -- reminiscent of Creator/MontyPython's ''Four Yorkshiremen'' sketch. It isn't hard to see why: establishing that the power of Christ saved you from misery is an accepted part of the script and the worse the misery, the greater the redemption. The very conservative evangelist and political lobbyist Dr Mike Evans is a typical example. A theme of his past few books has been the horrendous abuse he suffered at the hands of his drunken father; Evans repeatedly stresses that his conversion happened at age eleven after being beaten and left for dead, locked in a cold cellar. He had a vision of Jesus, and movingly relates that Jesus Christ was the first to call him "my son". All very moving and heartstring-plucking. Except... when you go back to Evans' earliest books, such as ''Young Lions Of Judah'', there is no mention ''at all'' of beatings, abuse, neglect and misery. In the earlier version of his autobiography, Mike Evans tells of being happy, successful, eighteen, and owning a fast car with lots of money in his pocket. Yet something seemed missing, so he started attending church to see if he could pull Christian girls... and he stayed. No mention of an abusive drunken dad, beatings and dark cold cellars in which he was visited by Jesus at age eleven. (Though you'd have thought face-time with Jesus was significant enough to put into a book.) He may just have repressed the bad memories and they emerged later... at a time when his ministry needed lots of money.

* ''Literature/AngelasAshes'' is the 1996 memoir of Frank McCourt (1930—2009), an Irish-American child growing up in poverty in Ireland. It is a collection of various anecdotes and stories of his impoverished childhood and early adulthood in Limerick, Ireland..