The public’s appetite for gruesome, heave-making detail always disconcerts me. I consider myself to be robust rather than squeamish; matter-of-fact rather than wet. My eyes don’t well with tears of joy at the sight of kittens playing. I understand that not everything is lovely, but I don’t trawl for trauma, either. If I see a particularly upsetting headline, I skim what comes below and stop reading the second I’ve got the gist. I stupidly assume that most people feel the same way, when quite clearly the opposite is true.

The idea, for example, that there would be a hungry readership for a mass-market paperback about Baby P – 300 pages of minute detail, say – strikes me as revolting and morally gross. It is dubious, to say the least, to get your kicks from devouring pages of grim detail about someone else’s stomach-churning misery – details that offer no insight, that shine no light, but that merely confirm what you already knew: that some people are monstrous and that some people’s lives are desperate.

This would appear to be a minority view. No such book exists – yet – although I’ve no doubt that some enterprising soul is putting one together as we speak. Would it be a bestseller? Probably. People come up with all sorts of excuses to feed their quasi-pornographic appetite for other people’s misery: it’s “important” to understand the evil that ordinary-seeming people are capable of; it’s “fascinating” to read about people’s depravity; it’s “necessary” to be fully informed before forming an opinion (that last is especially disingenuous, given that the opinion is usually formed within 30 seconds of the first news report).

And, of course – unspoken, but at the core of all this – reading this stuff makes you feel better about your own life’s shortcomings, because at least your dad didn’t rape you. But then a tub of ice-cream or a glass of wine or whatever harmless vice keeps you going makes you feel better, too.

I don’t think misery lit is a harmless vice. I don’t think people should be cheered by the fact that they weren’t victims of incest. And I don’t think reading about victims of incest ought to pass for entertainment. I think people who read these books should hang their heads in shame.

Misery lit, once the province of tiny American publishing houses that no one had ever heard of, is now enormous business; in Britain the sector is worth about £24m. Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It (1995) is widely credited with bringing the genre to the mass market. That book, and its sequels, have spent a combined total of 448 weeks on The New York Times’s bestseller list, despite the chorus of doubts about its veracity (doubts come with the territory).

Frank McCourt’s classmates have raised many a quizzical eyebrow over his Angela’s Ashes. A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (1997) by “Misha Defonseca” was a European bestseller, translated into 18 languages – and then shown to be nonsense: the author was not Jewish; her parents were not deported; she did not roam Europe killing Germans and bonding with wolves. Sometimes, people just make it up.

What is especially astounding about misery lit is that its readership is estimated to be 80% to 90% female, with the bulk of sales taking place in supermarkets. Presumably, during the weekly shop, the typical customer picks up a volume about a child who spent his infancy being punched to go with the Pringles. Are these the same women who are expressing their grief and anger about Baby P all over the internet: the ones setting up online shrines, or grotesque social networking groups that enable one to become a “fan” of Baby P?

If they’re not in the supermarket or online, perhaps they’re in Waterstone’s at its section called Painful Lives, browsing through titles such as the hugely popular Please, Daddy, No, which is about a child raped by his father before becoming a plaything for paedophiles – just the thing to curl up with on a rainy Sunday. Torey Hayden, the American author who produces titles such as Ghost Girl – about a child so chronically abused that she seemed half-dead – has sold 25m books worldwide.

I hold the possibly old-fashioned, or maybe just hippieish, or maybe just sane, view that you can’t dictate what lodges itself in your head. That’s why I’m not keen on young children watching horror films or reading horror books – not when a close friend has had recurring nightmares for more than a decade as a result of a childhood devotion to James Herbert. Years ago I tried to explain this to my eldest son, then 10, when he announced that everyone in his class was reading A Child Called It and why couldn’t he and did I know that the mother in the book stabbed her son in the stomach and made him drink bleach?

I checked with other parents and, sure enough, these children, who five years ago had been in nursery, really were lapping up abuse memoirs. One mother said, “Well, at least he’s reading”, which makes you wonder: what’s wrong with Harry Potter?

Forget James Herbert: this is in another league altogether. It doesn’t take a child psychologist, surely, to point out the harm that such soul-polluting material might cause. Do we really want a world where some piece of horrific abuse prompts our children to say, “Oh yes, that’s just like the bit in Don’t Tell Mummy”, only to have the parent argue that no, actually, it’s more like the scenario in Damaged, or was it Daddy’s Little Girl? Many people already do and see nothing wrong with it. I think they should have their heads examined.

Still, there may be no need. It is possible that the libel suit being brought against Constance Briscoe - author of the bestselling abuse memoir Ugly – may coincide with a decrease in the public appetite for mis lit, a genre at its most popular during our period of greatest prosperity. In these financially constrained times perhaps we’ll develop an appetite for books that make us happy. Failing which, there’s always My Godawful Life: Abandoned. Betrayed. Stuck to the Window, by Michael Kelly, the first mis lit spoof featuring, among other things, living in a bird coop and being bullied by pigeons, as well as prostitution, Tourette’s, necrophilia, anorexia and autism. Bad taste? Hardly: there’s such an embarrassment of it elsewhere. But the beginning of the end, perhaps.

+ A report by Shelter last week said that middle-aged couples who choose to live apart contribute to the housing shortage. “Living apart together” – where the couple are a couple but each has a separate home – is, the report suggests, increasingly common among middle-aged, middle-class couples who can afford to run two houses; 1.1m women have chosen this option.

Having been one of them, I can’t say I blame them. Living apart together seems to me the only way to conduct a relationship sensibly, although I appreciate that, unfortunately, it isn’t an option that is financially available to enough people. It ought to be encouraged for the simple reason that the things that sour marriages, or unions of any kind, are often to do with the drudgery of everyday life – with the accumulation of pathetic tiny resentments that seem ludicrous individually but snowball into serious obstacles, such as the fact that you know you shouldn’t be driven to distraction by the loo seat being up (and having been up every day for the past 10 years) but you can’t help yourself: rage strikes. Rage leads to bad mood, bad mood leads to row, row leads to discussion of mother-in-law etc etc.

If you live apart, every encounter is a date. What’s bad for the housing shortage is the only way forward for marriages.

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