A misery memoir from Alan Cumming that’s surprisingly thoughtful

Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but even if the names of the characters vary, all these books share the same basic plot. A child is horribly abused in some way, but eventually manages to break free from its upbringing, like a chick hatching from an egg. Good comes out of bad. They are heart-warming, therapeutic and ruthlessly commercial books that use one person’s unhappiness as an opportunity to make a lot of other people very happy indeed, especially the accountants at big publishing houses.

In some respects Alan Cumming’s memoir slips into the genre like a hand into a glove. The cover blurb informs readers that it is ‘a powerful story about embracing the best aspects of the past and triumphantly pushing the darkness aside’, and as with many similar memoirs one senses a tape recorder in the background.