“Reproducing like bacteria, a new literary genre has wholly infected the bestseller charts. As much as 30% of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of accounts of similarly grinding childhood misery. In the hardback chart, meanwhile, Abandoned, Anya Peters’s account of a childhood of rejection that culminated with her living in a car, has overtaken the recent hit Wasted, in which Mark Johnson describes the childhood beatings that led to his heroin addiction at 11.”