Sunny McCreary does not remember ever eating food during his childhood, or indeed having any clothes, toys or friends. The family's meagre income all went on crack cocaine for his mother and nails for his stepfather to pound into his flesh, his favourite pastime. Kept in a bird coop by his parents, Sunny endured a childhood of neglect, abuse and being bullied. In the course of the most painful life ever, he survived tragedy and maiming, a savage convent-school education, being pimped out, and a degrading addiction. Then things got really bad...

Welcome to the world of the misery memoir. Ever since the publication of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, the bestselling portrayal of an impoverished childhood in Ireland, and Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It, in which the author chronicled the abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic and mentally unbalanced mother, tales of childhood poverty, depression, addiction and abuse have dominated the book charts.

The titles of recent publishing successes sound like the cries you would hear if you opened the very doors of Hell. Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy's Struggle to Survive. No One Wants You: A True Story of a Child Forced into Prostitution. And who could forget Stuart Howarth's Please, Daddy, No, in which the author recalls how he was repeatedly raped by his father, forced to scoff pigswill and abused by paedophiles before becoming a cocaine addict, an arsonist and, finally, killing his father.

Publishers have made a mint from the genre. According to one estimate, such books account for 9 per cent of the British market, generating £24million of sales. And some predict that the so-called literature of inspiration to be found in the “painful lives” or “endurance and survival” categories of bookshops will expand further, with sub-genres such as medical misery (how my life was made unbearable by Alzheimer's/depression/cancer/a rare blood disease); dog misery (how Fido helped me through Alzheimer's/depression/cancer/a rare blood disease) and celebrity misery (Billy Connolly on sex abuse, Sharon Osbourne on overcoming cancer and being married to an incomprehensible Brummie, etc).

But I take the opposite, more cheerful view. I think that the misery-lit bubble is about to burst. And while this may be just wishful thinking - I had a memoir of my own published this year, and hate people assuming that it is of the misery variety - there are several arguments in support of this thesis, not least that the genre has been terminally undermined by scandals over veracity.

Of course, memoirs and factual inaccuracies go together like Ireland and a rainy day. In 1836 a book called The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, which claimed to dish the dirt on a Montreal convent, became a hit, only for it to transpire that the revelations were untrue and the writer disturbed. However, regardless of the outcome of the libel case between Constance Briscoe, the British lawyer who wrote a bestselling memoir called Ugly which recounted a childhood of emotional and physical abuse, and her mother, who says that the claims are fiction, the sheer number of memoir-related scandals is incredible.

Barely a week seems to pass without a memoirist being crucified for claiming to have spent years in prison for drugs trafficking when in fact he had only been cautioned for possessing a bit of weed, or for writing an account of getting lost in the Sahara when in fact she had just taken a wrong turn in Sutton Coldfield. James Frey confessed to Oprah Winfrey that he exaggerated elements of his drinking memoir A Million Little Pieces, and this year Love and Consequences, a book about growing up in gangland LA by Margaret B. Jones, was published in the US, only to be withdrawn after the author admitted that it wasn't true.

Secondly, life is getting tougher for us all with the economic downturn, and it makes sense that if Britons loved reading about misery when things were going well, they will want to be cheered up when things are going badly. After all, the misery memoir is very much a Western phenomenon. The average Indian or Kenyan needs only to look out of the window to feel grateful for his or her lot, and maybe we will soon feel the same, too.

Tentative sales figures provide hope: under the headline “Gloom envelopes the misery memoir market”, The Bookseller reported in May that retailers and publishers are struggling in a saturated market, and by September it was reporting that misery memoir sales had fallen by some 30 per cent in the year.

However, the main reason why I think that misery-lit faces an unhappy demise is that it has become a parody of itself. The extent of this is best illustrated by a review that someone called J. Crow has left on amazon.co.uk for a book called My Godawful Life by Sunny McCreary, the publicity blurb from which I quoted in the introduction to this piece. The book is actually written by one Michael Kelly, and is a parody. The one-star review from J. Crow, meanwhile, is a complaint and reads: “I have read several “bad start, makes good” books over the years and enjoyed experiencing the tales of how people have overcome great tragedy in their lives and gone on to become rounded people who achieve highly ... I assumed this book to be one of those books. There is no clue on the cover or back page to suggest that this is anything other than an honest tale of a harrowing life. Upon purchasing it and reading the first page, I realised that it was indeed a parody of such books. I feel that the author has acted appallingly in writing this book ... I am no prude, but was disgusted...”

J. Crow is right, of course. On the face of it there are no clues to the book's humorous intent. Except that “Humour” is in capital letters on the back. And one of the reviews on the cover claims to be from “Misery Lit Review” and exclaims “sensational ... the gloom-ride of the summer ... makes the Book of Job look like the Life of Riley”. And the first chapter is entitled “I am born, a terrible mistake in retrospect”. And the first paragraph describes the narrator being born in a shack, choking on the umbilical cord, being dropped on the floor by a doctor and then inadvertently kicked across the room (“It was to set the tone for the rest of my life”). And the publisher has described it as “more horrible than A Child Called It, more heart-rending than Ugly and more repulsive than the Alastair Campbell diaries ... the feel-bad book of the year”.

When I first stumbled across this review, having greatly enjoyed My Godawful Life, I thought it was the most depressing thing I had ever read because it showed just how prurient readers had become. But, having dwelt on it, I now think that it is actually hugely encouraging because it suggests that the genre has become a joke and its days are therefore numbered.

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