Susan Hill exposes the damage a misery memoir can cause, and does so all the more persuasively because she has chosen to do so in an imaginary setting with imagined characters, thus demonstrating again that fiction, when well done, reveals truths more cogently than biography or memoirs.

This shouldn’t surprise. All Kipling’s biographers have given their version of his childhood experiences in the ‘House of Desolation’ as he called the place in his own reticent memoir, ‘Something of Myself.’ Their accounts are moving enough; yet can’t compare with the bleak force of ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’. Likewise biographical accounts of the similarly unhappy childhood of H. H. Munro (Saki) are inevitably feeble when set against the savage indignation of that remarkable story ‘Sredni Vashtar’, in which the abused c,hild is permitted a revenge denied in real life. In short, in the right hands, misery transmuted into fiction beats memoirs hands-down every time.

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