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This year's crop of confessional biographies has taken a sober turn. Meet the growing clique of "hic lit" authors who have forsaken the demon drink and are saving themselves fortunes in therapists' fees by writing about their travails.
Publishers are falling over themselves in the hunt for the next big title in the "painful lives" genre that has so captivated readers since bursting on to the book scene a couple of years ago.
Alice King, a professional wine writer, will be the latest to join the throng when High Sobriety: Confessions of a Drinker, arrives on the shelves in May.
Authors and alcoholism have a long history - think Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski - but the days when writers' pens dripped with neat alcohol are long gone.
Publishers see "hic lit" as the natural successor to the "real lives" columns that dominate women's magazines.
"It's voyeurism," says Rachel Russell, director of books for Britain's WH Smith. "People buy the books for the same reason that they buy gossip magazines to see the unsavoury pictures."
To date, James Frey's drinking and drug addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, has racked up the strongest sales - partly thanks a confession to Oprah Winfrey he had exaggerated some of his tales.
The craze for "misery literature" dates from Angela's Ashes in 1996, and in 2000 Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It broke new ground by detailing the horrors of child abuse and it became Amazon's 11th best-selling "endurance and survival" biography.
Some commentators knock the controversial genre as being little better than pornography in another guise.
But Scott Pack, of independent British publisher The Friday Project, says: "These are the sort of books that are popular with people who don't buy books very often. You can be snotty and think its not great literature, but it gets people reading. Plus real-life stories are more interesting than anything you can make up and these sorts of books are often written unpretentiously."
- INDEPENDENT
