Cliched Writing
In what may sound insensitive and without any real basis for speculation, I'm forced to admit that, along with many other literary devices and narrative subjects, the story of child abuse and neglect has entered the realm of the cliche, or at least for me it has. Stereotyping abuse is harsh and an obvious problem when it comes to gauging one's own sense of priorities and the amount of sympathy any given story may breed within one's self. However, I feel that the story of abused children has become a rote process that can be, and perhaps is, recreated by writers and others who have never experienced the phenomenon firsthand in any way, shape or form. I feel that I could, if given the chance, create a plausible character or scenario in which abuse occurs, and have all the trademark occurrences in place to make that sound, at least somewhat, credible in nature, if not wholly believable from start to finish.

The only reason that I felt the need to remark this way is due to my initial experience to a certain writer's work who has become somewhat of a cult figure due to his writings on the subject of abuse, which he has been a victim of. J.T. Leroy has become somewhat of a celebrity author in a day and age where authors who are celebrities seem few and far between. Many artists have become enamored by Leroy's prose that centers primarily around the abuse inflicted upon him by his mother and his desperate fall into the life of a male prostitute. I know, you can almost see the cliches coming before you even start.

After reading a profile on Leroy in The New York Times, I felt that I should give his works a try. In what has to be a record even for me, I couldn't get through the first two pages. The book in question is actually a set of loosely connected short stories entitled The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. The prose is good, no question, but the story itself is terrible. Reading about neglected children, while never entertaining, should at least try to move beyond the shocking recollections of abuse itself, and Leroy's writing doesn't do that. I read the first few pages with skepticism and finally disgust, not at the actions of the characters but by the predictability of what was happening and what would probably happen next, which wasn't at all something I cared to continue reading to find out.

In treating any type of harsh subject, authors need to move beyond simply recounting the harsh descriptions of unimaginable horror and atrocities beyond comprehension. Any book on the Holocaust, for example, that strives to do more than just recount the horrors of the Nazi regime's actions does so by digging deeper into the psyches of the actors involved. What these works don't do is simply catalog the atrocities themselves. Simply do so would be at the risk of rendering something that's beyond cliche into a cliche. Unfortunately, writers like Leroy don't know that this is a risk, and they continue to write in a way that renders their histories into stereotypes that seem stamped out with the same cookie-cutter approach. Emotionally provocative writing is probably the hardest effect to achieve, but it takes a special writer to do that and avoid rendering their experiences into simply unemotional recollections.