Sad but true
Guilty Pleasures: Real life stories
by
Beatrice Hatch
uploaded: 12-10-2004
Do you sneak your copy of Chat into the loo, ashamed of your love of the real life story? Well, at least it's better than reading Mills and Boon, says Beatrice Hatch
In the desperate catfight between prurience and moral superiority lies the battered carcass of the pleasure which is reading “Real Life Stories”. They lurk in the centre of cheap magazines between a feature on how to do your make-up like Cat Deeley and a full page advertising feature for an inflatable guest bed: “I married a man who turned out to be a wife-beating, alcoholic, cross-dressing, cat shagger. And then I married his brother who was teetoal but a bigamist”. Compelling revelations of people who look as bad as life has treated them. Mournful faces peering grimly from a thin but glossy mag. Life’s battlers, bearing the festering stamp of real life across their heads and four hundred and fifty quid in their back pocket.
It does feel terribly wrong to peep into these people’s miserable lives. To read the tales of serial victims, watch people spreading out before you the proof of their consistently bad judgement and worse than imaginable luck. Yet, once your eyes have flitted over “Hurry up Sinead,” yelled my sister Romilly “don’t forget it’s your blind date tonight” it’s a quick wince, flinch and you’ve reached “after five weeks in hospital Sinead still can’t feed herself but she has learned a valuable lesson: Next time, I’ll make sure he loves me back”. God, you could weep. What poor old Sinead actually needs is to realise that being “incurably romantic” and hoping each time she goes down the Coach and Horses that the big man who stares at her “might be that special someone” and not a dangerous dog owning loony, is a rubbish way to live her life. Yes, from now on, she must swap her romantic novels for real life stories, and get a bit savvy.
Real life stories should be required reading for teenage girls, and grown women with the sentimentality of teenage girls. A literary diet of romantic fiction leads to emotional hell. Readers will simply become disgruntled, disillusioned harridans with confused and bullied men who feel they can never, ever, ever do anything right. The more vulnerable and gullible may skew her judgement to make “mad Gavin and his pit bull Stalin” become a dashing Prince who loves her more than any woman has ever been loved. All these romantic ladies must swap the Judy Bloom and Mills and Boon for a proper serving of Real Life - with photos. After a real life story, even the most tedious rugby fan or political activist or man who has bought his first copy of an Anthony Beevor book will seem like a lovely shining Knight. So count your blessings, bints, and go for the real deal!
|
|
|
 |
|
|
"Life’s battlers, bearing the festering stamp of real life across their heads and four hundred and fifty quid in their back pocket" |
|
|
|
|
