Toytown Traumas

Julie Burchil on the topics that hound our fiction:

"I'm referring to the endless stream of books regarding what I call Toytown Traumas; that is, sorrow which is either self-inflicted - drink, drugs, divorce - or which happens to so many of us as not to actually count as anything special: death of a loved one, loss of a job, divorce. Invariably they are written by journalists from the middle or upper-middle class, educated at some expense either privately or by the state; for some reason, middle-class and/or educated people who use their private lives for profit feel able to look down on working-class and/or uneducated people for doing the same, be they an incest survivor or a kiss-and-tell girl. But surely it's far worse to blab if you're educated, because you have so many other options to turn a buck?"