Never so bad as they can't get worse

Ian Sansom surveys a batch of tales of human misery and abuse from Josiane Behmoiras, Mary Loudon, Rosalind B Penfold and Elaine Bass

Dora B: A Memoir of My Mother by Josiane Behmoiras 240pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99

Relative Strangers: A Life After Death by Mary Loudon 384pp, Canongate, £16.99

Dragonslippers: This Is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like by Rosalind B Penfold 240pp, Harper Press, £9.99

A Secret Madness: The Story of a Marriage by Elaine Bass 288pp, Profile, £12.99

They call them misery memoirs - books by survivors of abuse, or by relatives of the troubled and the abused, books of sorrow and rage by the wronged and those who wish to right wrongs. Publishers publish them, more and more all the time, the endless tales of human misery, like court reports between hard covers, or paperback analysts' notebooks, overwhelming the distinctions between autobiography and self-help and non-fiction, and we read them and enjoy them and yet perhaps feel instinctively that they are somehow dubious, morally murky. Memoirs exist anyway in a grey zone of ethics and aesthetics, and we know that every act of writing is an act of injustice, so how then are the wounded to write about their torments and the torments of others? How to afford dignity to pain? How do we write out trauma?

Josiane Behmoiras' Dora B is a book about her mother's madness. Growing up in France in the early 1960s, Behmoiras describes a childhood of appalling squalor, scavenging for food, stealing everything they owned. "We sneaked into the courtyards of rich people, lifted the lids of rubbish bins and found our treasures: a bunch of wilted pink artificial flowers, a white embroidered tablecloth speckled with rust, a man's shirt marked with red lipstick, a satin purse coming undone at the seam."

Behmoiras' mother, Dora, is a Jew, and eventually the Jewish Agency pays for mother and child to go to a settlement in Israel, where they're given a primitive, asbestos-walled hut to live in and some basic provisions. But the Promised Land is a nightmare: their neighbours steal their food; fighting is Sabbath entertainment; and Dora descends deeper into mental illness. She believes she's being spied on, that there are hidden microphones everywhere, that people are setting out to cheat and persecute her. Behmoiras eventually escapes both from Israel and her mother, moving to Australia, but Dora's final illness draws her back.

The brilliance of the book - which is everywhere dense, rich and associative - is that Behmoiras leaves her mother entirely in the precincts of her madness; she does not try to explain it or to rationalise it; she does not attempt to defend her mother's behaviour or to condemn the behaviour of others. This, Behmoiras seems to suggest, simply is what is: the book is pure testimony.

Mary Loudon's Relative Stranger, on the other hand, takes a more strident and moral tone. It's an intelligent work of self-searching, self-reassurance and justification. Loudon tells the story of her elder sister, Catherine, who suffered from schizophrenia and who died, estranged from her family, aged 47. Catherine believed MI5 was after her; she was obsessed with Tibet and was a gifted pianist and artist. After Catherine's death Loudon devotes herself to finding out about her last years - the sisters had lost touch - and in so doing attempts to restore dignity to both Catherine and herself.

Loudon's method is to interview people who knew her sister, such as George and Joyce, who run the local shop where Catherine bought her groceries and who looked out for her and always gave her a sandwich. From such examples of ordinary, everyday virtue Loudon gains hope. "The world turns and surely, repeatedly, humanity disgraces itself. Yet there is hope. At least, there is if you believe that the good that is done can serve as a significant compensation for the bad. If so, perhaps an act of neglect elsewhere was negated by each sandwich George made for Catherine in Bristol."

Loudon's clear moral tone and determined purpose give her prose a swing and balance. "When someone is asleep and they cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, they are dreaming. When someone is awake and they cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, they are having a nightmare from which even sleep is no escape." Relative Stranger offers lessons and conclusions.

Rosalind B Penfold's graphic novel Dragonslippers: This Is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like is a plea. Penfold is a pseudonym, and the book attempts to do exactly what its subtitle suggests, being a cartoon account of a woman lost, as she puts it, in "a quicksand of verbal, emotional, sexual and, ultimately, physical abuse". The book is an appeal to all those who have suffered to "identify warning signs of abuse". The drawings in the book - often crude and sketchy - become almost a pastiche of human misery and violence, in order to emphasise Penfold's universalising impulse and appeal. "This is the story of a worldwide phenomenon," she writes. Penfold eventually discovers a way out of the relationship through therapy.

There was no such thing as therapy for Elaine Bass. Bass is 84 years old, A Secret Madness is her first book, and hers is a story of England and the 1950s; a superb, tragic period piece. Bass's husband, Gerald, seems to have suffered from some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder - though Bass never names the illness. "'I know you'll think I'm mad,' Gerald says", the book begins, but Bass doesn't want to believe it. "Gerald isn't mad, Gerald isn't mad, Gerald isn't mad." Obsessed with routines and dictionaries, Gerald eventually becomes violent and one day simply leaves. There is no reconciliation.

So what can we learn from these very different and harrowing accounts? There is an argument that such memoirs are inherently vulgar and bullying appeals for sympathy, or that they are barely disguised acts of vengeance. Yet they are also necessary reminders that humanity's capacity for good and for ill is no greater or lesser than ever. They mock our expectations of what life should be like and, as such, they are beyond criticism. Can you criticise pain?

&#183: Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books is published by Fourth Estate

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