One thing the Lonely Planet forgot to point out in its new guide to Britain (in which the British are described, not inaccurately I thought, as celebrity-obsessed, cyber-porn-addicted alcoholics) is how empathic we’ve all become.

So, for example, I can tell you that I am addicted to drink or partial to drugs and not fear opprobrium. I can hit you with the news that I am anorexic, bipolar or a victim of abuse and I can rely on you to listen. If whatever happened to me was especially bad, I mean almost but not, when it came down to it, unprintably horrible, you’d probably do more than just listen: you’d rush to read the first interview, sit glued to the harrowing documentary, shell out for the poignantly graphic autobiography. Yes, if something terrible happened to me, particularly if it was potentially sordid, I could count on you for your empathy. Lately, empathy has become this country’s middle name.

So, in the spirit of these confessional times, here is my admission.

I have not been kept up all night because I’m worrying about Madeleine McCann. My mood doesn’t do a U-turn every time Cuddle Cat is mentioned on ITV News. I care, of course I care, it would be inhuman not to, but if you really want to know, I think the public references to a private thing such as a child’s soft toy are in poor taste, as are the overfamiliar abbreviation of the girl’s name to bring us closer to the scene of this wretched mystery. Worse than the abbreviations are the people who correct the abbreviators: “It’s Madeleine, not Maddy. That’s what the parents call her,” in an offended tone as if they know her, or have been personally affected. People talk about “feeling the McCanns’ pain”, but we do not, and cannot.

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What else haven’t I done? Ruminated endlessly and pointlessly with others about whether or not she was abducted; strung out baseless theories about childless oligarchs, or international paedophile networks, or wished aloud and angrily that the death penalty be reintroduced (but only for sex offenders). I can’t see how my doing any of these things could have meaningfully contributed to the missing girl’s wellbeing, but no doubt you’ll correct me on this point.

Other countries are starting to wonder what is happening to Britain. The Herald Tribune, which initially reported the McCann case in full, now prints reports on how the British are coping. Not how the McCanns are coping. But how the British public are coming to terms with what has happened to the McCanns. But the Herald Tribune is wrong in assuming that this is “the British” en masse. It is specifically British mothers – not by any means all of them, but a critical mass of mothers – who have collectively decreed that, where potential child abuse is concerned, caring is not enough.

Where the welfare of a child is concerned one must, in Britain, now be obsessed – especially when there is a whiff of abuse. And not merely obsessed but hysterically, visibly, mawkishly so. Once you are obsessed, it is necessary to wear your hysteria on your sleeve. Or, as MPs did with yellow ribbons, on your lapel. More important still is the need to reassure yourself that everybody else feels the same. That the vicarious worrying is not just normal behaviour but required. There is a tyranny here.

Now let’s get back to the confessional culture. In the publishing industry it has found its natural home, the lucrative subgenre “Mis Lit”. Misery Lit, ie, memoirs of child abuse, “have emerged as the liveliest new category of books”, reports The Bookseller.Five to ten of these books come out every month. A high-ranking publisher friend tells me that the books’ lurid titles are made up at brain-storming meetings before the manuscript has been seen or in some cases, written.

So we have: Please Daddy, No; A Child Called “It”; Don’t Tell Mummy: A True Story of the Ultimate Betrayal; A Girl Called Karen: A True Story of Sexual Abuse and Resilience; and Damagedto name a handful. The stand-out Mis Lit success story, Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood, has sold 500,000 copies. Of the top 100 bestselling paperbacks in 2006, 11 were misery memoirs; with total sales of 1.9 million copies.

Why are these books so popular? Like the McCann case they deliver a predictable emotional charge and allow the reader to experience a strong sense of vicarious self-pity.

Richard Humphreys, Borders senior nonfiction buyer, says that an “element of voyeurism, a macabre fascination” attracts readers to stories of human suffering. Patrick Janson-Smith, a literary agent at Christopher Little Agency, suggests that “a fair amount of prurience” is involved.

But who reads these books, I asked The Bookseller.“It’s 95 per cent mums.”

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture – when a woman’s idea of relaxation is to watch or read about a major catastrophe unfolding in somebody else’s life? Especially if it’s about paedophilia. Perhaps it makes her feel better, to assuage temporarily all that guilt and paranoia that mothers seem to habitually now carry around with them. Perhaps, deep down, she finds it titillating. Perhaps she enjoys the tingle of self-righteous misandry that most stories of sex abuse will allow her. If this lurid compassion is empathy, the McCanns don’t need it.

The missing girl few have heard about

I will eventually get off this morbid subject, but finally we have an answer to the question: what if the McCanns hadn’t been white and good-looking? In a strikingly similar case, except that it was in America, Jewel Mahavia Strong, 4, went missing on a beach in Florida last May. Local police assumed that she had drowned, but now a new video obtained by Jewel’s frantic parents shows her alive and in the company of three women.

You can read about her parents’ desperate search for their daughter on their MySpace page: myspace.com/jewelmahaviastrong. Because Jewell is black, the appeal for her safe return has somehow not managed to attract much interest beyond the black community in Britain and the US.

Toxic shock

Wilkinson Sword is giving away free Marian Keyes novels with its razors. Why? Has anyone on this earth ever read a book while shaving and not amputated either a leg or a face? But the trend for giving away useless or mutually exclusive gifts with products started long ago. I remember the publishers of Just 17 lavished free beach bags on readers who, in those prebudget airline times, could never have afforded to go abroad. The bag became an emblem of all the beach holidays we had never had and mine hung funnily in my closet for years.

Perhaps the best example of the trend happened to a friend in the US who opened a box of Cheerios and discovered a free Britney Spears CD hidden among the dry, tasteless hoops. This might have been a winning marketing formula had the CD single in question not been Spears’s No 1 hit, Toxic.

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