Some people are wierd. In fact, quite a few people are a bit odd. I was in WH Smith yesterday and there's an actual section under fiction - a whole shelf dedicated to "Tragic Life Stories". Wierd. I mentioned this to a friend of mine and she told me that a friend of hers had recently finished a book called "Please Daddy No". Who reads these? Some of you out there must do, there wouldn't be so many otherwise. Talk about making money out of people's misery, even if it is their own. Tragic Life Stories. jeez. It's like porn. I can understand occasionally reading a story like this (liverpudlian orphan, serbian refugee, prostitute etc), I can even understand it being a genre of sorts, if you wanted to summarise a type of tale... but to have it labelled on shelves so people can navigate to towards it
"I'm looking for a good read"
"Really, what kind of book are you looking for? Romance, fantasy, corporate thriller?"
" No no, Tragic Life Stories. I like to read about prolonged and unrelenting tales of abuse, sexual assault, neglect, physical disability and traumatic experiences that leave the resulting adult broken, fragile on the verge of suicide with only enough motivation to sell their story to a subsidiary publishers purposely created to cater for an audience who dwell on pain and anquish."
"Right, well I have Jade Goody's autobiography here."

The other thing I realized about this genre is that it is truly pulp fiction, incredibley easy to write. How difficult would it be to write a story without a purposeful plot or complex characters, but simply about a rather sympathetic character to whom a string of dreadful things happen?

"I was born in a council estate in Glasgow in '81. My father drank heavily, though wasn't around very often. He abused when he did. My mum used to beat me when she didn't have any heroine. My school didn't recognise my pain, so I stopped going and ended up hooked on crack aged 11 and pregnant by 13... " and on and on and on until finally they left town or whatever and crested the hill. Urgh. It's boring more than anything. And now I'll make a joke about how the people who read this genre are more than likely also suffering from their own tragic life story.