Gang-raped at 14 in a Sydney suburb; pregnant at 13 from an arranged marriage in Pakistan; sheltering from rebel fire as a child in Sudan - disastrous childhoods are big business.
Even the chairwoman of judges of the Orange Prize has lamented the misery memoir trend now infecting fiction.
"Reading 120 books I did find myself thinking, `Oh God, not another dead baby'," said Kirsty Lang.
"There were a hell of a lot of abused children and family secrets."
Which despite their value, is much the same feeling I had on reading this group of women's anguish.
The Making of Me: Finding my future after assault (Macmillan, pbk, $38) is her story about the struggles she faced in the four years leading up to the difficult trials.
Refusing to be quiet, she spoke out to the Australian 60 Minutes about her ordeal and subsequently became a brief media sensation.
While the teenager's inner fortitude is inspiring, read with a dose of patience as the writing seems to be a verbatim transcript of Tegan's actual teen voice.
At age 8 she was returned to her family from the children's home she'd grown up in.
The following years were a torrent of abuse, slave-labour and a furtive trip to Pakistan for an arranged marriage.
At age 17 she and her infant son found a saviour in a family friend who dramatically aided her escape and later married her.
Convinced by her mother she was hideous, Briscoe embarked on a law school career broken by secret trips to a plastic surgeon.
Matter-of-fact writing makes her difficulties easier to stomach but because it follows her university life and early career, perhaps not as vicarious nor as enthralling as her first biography.
A chance discovery led to her high-profile modelling career with ground-breaking fashion magazine covers.
Alek: Sudanese Refugeee to International Supermodel (Virago, pbk, $39) is a simple read but makes a point of showing life as a game of chance and how she has both won and lost that game to her advantage.
Criticisms of the writing itself aside, memoirs are an uneasy genre to read.
Collections like the above of personal memories are not history per se, which like any shoot-'em-up movie means you're suspending disbelief to some level while reading.
And after ploughing through four misery memoirs in as many weeks, I feel as though they are the new guilty pleasure.
If misery has replaced romance novels then they are best read with a grain of salt and the disclaimer that your worth as a person is not necessarily measured by the amount of suffering you have survived. -Victoria Macbeth
Victoria Macbeth is a Wellington writer.
