In Competition No. 2571 you were invited to submit an extract from the life story of a famous figure from history written in the style of a contemporary misery memoir.
The seemingly insatiable appetite for tales of other people’s torment and degradation that keeps ‘mis lit’ at the top of the bestseller lists is as depressing as the subject matter of the books themselves, which may be why, overall, you were on less sparkling form than usual this week.
As one might expect, the Tudors loomed large, but I was surprised no one chose Job, surely the original misery memoirist. In the great tradition of the genre, Katie Mallett’s Vlad the Impaler blames his parents: ‘I am told that when I was very young my mother would stick my nappy pin right through the fabric to my skin, and then hang me outside on the washing line by the pin until I stopped crying.’ We feel your pain, Vlad.
The winners are printed below and get £25 each. George Simmers nabs the bonus fiver.
I felt it whenever someone looked at me. ‘You are special,’ their eyes proclaimed. ‘You are not like the others.’ Gradually I came to understand the detestable implications of my misfortune. The law itself decreed me different from the rest. I remember vividly how on one election day I stared through my window at ordinary citizens walking freely, to the polling stations from which I would be for ever barred. I would be classed with the convicted criminals and certified lunatics, disenfranchised, marginalised. When the servant brought my tea to the nursery, in a cup of delicate bone china, I performed the one act of rebellion open to me. I poured it into a big plebeian china mug, and I sobbed.
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