Middle-Class Writers Should Just Shut Up!
Guardian writer Julie Burchill wants all middle-class writers to cease writing about their mildly disconcerting childhoods. "Another month, another sob-story; the embellished memories of some poor ickle depressed or alcoholic oofums...who feels a bit miserable and doesn't see any damn reason why the rest of us shouldn't suffer too....I'm referring to the endless stream of books regarding what I call Toytown Traumas; that is, sorrow which is either self-inflicted - drink, drugs, divorce - or which happens to so many of us as not to actually count as anything special: death of a loved one, loss of a job, divorce." She does have a point that it gets tiring reading of the problems of the privileged and reasonably privileged in precious memoir form. On the other hand, there goes Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Aciman's Out of Egypt and my forthcoming memoir, Growing Up In Suburbia Was Pretty Nice But Sometimes I Got Grounded. [Guardian]