I once went on holiday and met an American tourist who, within two hours of meeting me, had told me that her dad was a policeman who had abused her as a child, that she had run away and got married young, to the wrong man, had a baby, had the baby adopted, then got divorced. She ended up explaining all this to me because a local woman had pointed at her bikini and asked why she had a caesarean scar but no child.
I thought how much more slowly an English friendship might have got us to that conversation – say, 10 to 15 years more slowly, those stories finally bursting out of her late one night, all dripping in booze and shame and relief. Then I thought how brilliant it was to have fast-tracked such denouements, so this woman and I didn’t have to make small talk about the weather. She was cheerful, lovely and had nothing to be ashamed of. We talked about other, newer things after that.
Everybody has their stuff. Some people want to leave their stuff behind, and are able to do so. Some people, increasingly, want to talk about it. Last week the ex-wife of a well-known British performer took out an injunction to stop him publishing a memoir about abuse he suffered as a child. She lives overseas now and argues that their son, who is approaching his teenage years and has Asperger’s syndrome, would be upset by the book’s contents.
Might she be right? Possibly. Might someone in this situation, who has had to raise a child on her own, while a more successful ex goes off to make his fortune, feel his version of events is total bollocks? We have no way of knowing, but anything is possible. In any case, I feel for her, and not just because I’m a single mother, too.
But isn’t it more terrifying that somebody can now be stopped from writing about their own life, and the secrets they were forced to keep as a child? Child abuse is enabled by a culture of shame and secrecy. I don’t know about you, but every time I hear about another celebrity being sentenced via Operation Yewtree, I do a celebratory air punch. Not because I hate celebrities. Or because I love seeing people go to jail, or watching my childhood heroes turn out to be paedophiles. I do it because it means that somebody, somewhere, who has kept this horrible secret all their life, has finally been heard, and believed, and not made to feel as if they’re the one with the problem any more.
We are living in an age of unprecedented transparency – and for the country that invented the stiff upper lip, this is one enormous pendulum swing. Sometimes, the pendulum seems to have swung too far. The bookshops are heaving with misery memoirs. And, yes, it feels weird when someone you know posts on Facebook that it’s the 10-year anniversary of their mother’s suicide, and by the time you look, 37 people have already “liked” it, or pasted a sadface underneath. But wouldn’t you rather that than never hear about who or what it was that these people loved?
Jenni Murray, from Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, said earlier this year that she is appalled by public female figures such as Lily Allen and Caitlin Moran, with their tales of shagging and wanking and drugs: “These mothers and wives with supposedly glamorous lives whom young people look up to and strive to emulate. Yet they are willing to shout such things from the rooftops without a scintilla of shame.” The horror. Just imagine, these glamorous people admitting that sometimes their glamorous children bore them to tears, that some of the glamorous sex they’ve had made them feel as beautiful as a dead pig, and that sometimes they’ve taken glamorous drugs to try to feel anything in their hearts other than this.
Isn’t it an act of kindness to reveal ourselves in this way? Women used to tell each other the most ridiculous stories about princesses with blood in their shoes and pinpricks on their fingers, just to explain menstruation and sex. This is how fairytales came about – they were a way for women to tell their daughters the stuff they weren’t allowed to address. Today we can say these things out loud. Over-sharing is a kind of caring – and shame is a useless emotion.
• Follow Sophie on Twitter
