The contemporary genre of ‘misery memoirs’ is contradictorily named, since the narrative trajectory of such works is one of eventual redemption rather than irremediable descent. This is implied by the perhaps more accurate alternative description of the genre as one of ‘inspirational life stories’, where the use of the ambiguous term ‘stories’ reveals the misery memoir's appeal as both history and narrative. However, some critics argue that, since such memoirs have less of a ‘cathartic or motivational function’ than an ability to offer readers a ‘vicarious and voyeuristic experience’ of the most appalling suffering, it is indeed in terms of misery rather than inspiration that they should be described. In this chapter, I will introduce some different forensic approaches that have been taken towards three misery memoirs. While questions about the reliability of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, his account of a poverty-stricken upbringing in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, have been evaluated in literary terms, similar concerns in relation to Constance Briscoe's Ugly were approached litigiously, when the author was sued for libel by her mother, whom Briscoe described in her memoir as violent and neglectful. Kathy O'Beirne, the author of Don't Ever Tell, initially agreed to undergo an MRI brain-scan to determine the nature of her truthfulness, which has been contested by a wide range of commentators including members of her own family. Such a variety of responses, ranging from the intertextual to the legal and medical, reveals the high cultural significance of establishing reliability, if not veracity, in such cases. These are stark and literal instances of the critical and interpretive approaches that have been adopted towards all the texts that feature in this study.

These narratives of misery recalled are sufficiently united in formula and appeal to be seen in relation to the morphology of another genre in which the reader knows to expect the overcoming of vicissitudes, that of the folk- or fairytale, as outlined by the formalist critic Vladimir Propp. Misery memoirs are versions of the eighth of Propp's thirty-one folktale functions, in which a ‘villain’ causes ‘harm or injury’ to someone of the same family, a villainy that is ultimately and triumphantly vanquished.