My life’s just not miserable enough to write a book

Mar 12 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

I HAVE a confession to make. It is simply that I have no confession to make.

While that may seem paradoxical, it is true and makes writing an autobiography very difficult.

Not that I am planning to pen my memoirs just yet, you understand, although there may come a day when I am reclining in a rocking chair in my 80s, that I call my grandchildren to bring me a laptop or whatever the future equivalent will be.

But it’s not nice to realise that you can’t do something, or that nobody would be interested if you did, especially when it’s your life that you’re talking about.

The key problem is this – I have always been happy.

Granted, there were moments when I cried adolescent tears into my pillow because the boy I had asked out on his paper-round had looked straight at my feverish expression and replied in a single word – “No”.

My supposedly life-affirming experience as a language assistant in a French school turned, as I have mentioned in this column before, into seven long months in a brown bedsit, hand washing my clothes because I had forgotten the way to the college launderette, and I was too embarrassed to ask in the staffroom for directions for the third time.

I dreaded the 100m sprint at the age of 14 because the boys used to stand at the end of the track gawping and I hadn’t yet discovered sports bras.

And, yes, I have suffered doomed romances and stared at the bathroom scales in full Bridget Jones horror at the angle of the needle, I have lost pets and broken favourite toys, I have sprained my ankle more times than I can remember and had haircuts I’ve regretted, but in the grand scheme of things I have been incredibly lucky.

But, in case you think I’m starting to sound smug, there the luck ends because it means that I am unlikely to ever get a book deal in one of the most popular genres of publishing. They have dedicated shelves for it in bookshops these days, actually entire sections, labelled things like “misery lit” and “inspirational memoirs”, piled high with tales of lost childhood and abject misery.

The more anguished the better – the bigger the teddy bear that had its arms pulled off by an older brother, the spottier the teenager that was bullied at school, the wetter the weather on the author’s wedding day, the more drool on the publisher’s chin as he vigorously shakes your hand and signs you up to a sequel.

And, for a guaranteed best- seller, there must be a dramatic turn-around – at the very least a ray of hope at the end, at best a spotlight as bright as a sun beaming down upon the subject’s dazzling television/ Hollywood/modelling career.

I am not, in any way at all, suggesting that I am not grateful for having been protected from suffering any of the terrible ordeals that the people in the misery lit department have had to endure, and I do not intend to belittle their hardship.

But I do find it worrying that we are generally more enthusiastic when reading about other people’s distress than we are when thinking about our own good fortune.

On the other hand, I am not suggesting we all sit round in a circle throwing a ball to each other and sharing a jolly memory each time we catch it.

I would rather be forced to read 27 Mills & Boon novels while Days of Our Lives is on TV, ugh.

In fact, I’m not really sure what I am suggesting.

But if I can’t make it on to the ”inspirational memoirs” shelf, then I should clearly be giving this some more thought.

Self-help books may not have the immediate sales power of misery lit, but they’re a slow burner.

If I write one now, then maybe I’ll be able to afford a secretary when I get round to writing my autobiography in my 80s.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk