From middle class memoirs to trashy celebrity life stories, biographies in 2006 shared a belief in human indefatigability.
As with many areas of public life, the act of telling one's life story appears to have become polarised along class lines - not so much in what is revealed, but in how it's done. This has been a wonderful year for both the tastefully done, essentially middle-class memoir and the brash "I'm special, me!" autobiography.
That there have been so many to choose from has only highlighted the class cleave: memoirs come in small, slim form with minutely worked covers, while the autobiographies serve up value for money Iceland-style, in the form of giant hardbacks whose vast dust jackets can double as bedroom posters. Look inside, though, and you'll find enough in common between the former and the latter to reinforce a warm and festive belief in human indefatigability.
The fame of either type of author seems to matter less and less: what they can bring to the more universal story of holding on to your humanity in an alienating, sped-up world is now more important. There can be no other reason why people barely into their twenties - Celebrity Big Brother's Chantelle Houghton and Wayne Rooney among them - feel they have a story worth listening to. Splutter all you like about it being more to do with their agents' bank balances, but this year, they and their famous chums have created a niche of their own: the self-help celeb autobiography.
Of course, you wouldn't write either a memoir or an autobiography if you'd given up on life, so that fundamental sense of triumph, or triumph-in-progress, is a prerequisite. Or is it? Jonathan Rendall's Garden Hopping (Canongate), a short memoir about discovering the identity of his birth parents, contains an element of ambiguity that wouldn't have got past the first draft of one of the autobiographical doorstoppers.
Rendall, who is a sports writer and sometime professional gambler, has made a living out of picking his psychological scabs. He takes self-pity into whole new dimensions. He asks you to love him because he feels he has never been properly loved. As you read, however, you can see that people are prepared to do so if only he'll let them. That he himself can see this so clearly is what makes the book so sad - and yet, as he vows near the end to reform his life, so long given over to booze and macerating in what might have been, you can't be quite sure whether he'll really do it.
This is a "memoir of adoption" so solipsistic that it bears little resemblance to another published this year, Jeremy Harding's beautiful and utterly unsentimental Mother Country (Faber & Faber). Harding's tale could have been so similar to Rendall's: his adoptive parents were - not that he would ever say it so crudely himself - a bit odd. His father, Colin, had a terror of other people that led him to praise right-wing despots and encourage the family to live in a series of flood-prone houseboats. His fantasist mother, Maureen, seemed to agree to his adoption only under duress, but - and here is the source of Harding's apparent absence of insecurity - never let her discomfort show, which is more than can be said for many parents, adoptive or otherwise.
Alas, the mother of the former Atomic Kitten singer Kerry Katona springs to mind here. Her life of fear was quite different from that of Harding's parents, whose chief terror was of losing their precarious social standing. Such was the awfulness of Sue Katona's upbringing - the daughter of a prostitute, she was abused in care homes and, at 17, sold by her mother to a group of six men for sex - that its lasting effects infiltrate every page of Kerry's Too Much, Too Young: my story of love, survival and celebrity (Ebury Press). The book, really, is for and about her mother: Kerry aches for her, both as she is - inadequate as a mother, as dependent as a daughter - and how she ought to have been.
A few pages on from describing Sue's decision to stay with her violent boyfriend, thus consigning her daughter to foster parents, she's describing how, aged 26, she loves to snuggle under the duvet with her mum for a chat. It's her mum who introduces Kerry to drugs; it's her mum who then sells the story of Kerry's "cocaine shame" to the papers, presumably in order to buy more drugs. To a generation of vile snobs her own age, she's nothing more than chip-shop Kerry, a frozen-food-endorsing chav, though she has endured more than any of them put together.
Back on the memoir side - although the divide gets more flimsy with every read - John Burnside's A Lie About My Father (Jonathan Cape) turns the stuff of working-class misery into a kind of rapturous poetry. There is a section in the middle of the book where he simply flies into the soul of his drunken, bitter father: you hate him and you understand him at once. As Burnside Sr retreats further into a world of imagined slights and rigid certainties, his son broadens his horizons through LSD: not quite as sustainable as learning through love and books, he later discovers.
There are parallel lines of angst and sanguine acceptance running through Jonathan Franzen's cherishable "personal history" The Discomfort Zone (Fourth Estate), in which the very fact of having parents is shown to be the thing that both breaks you and makes you. That, ultimately, is what all these books are about; and no matter how clichéd the subject seems, there are always new ways of discussing it.
And while happy families are held to be the dullest of the lot, there's much to be learned from the picture of solid, secure, loving parenting presented by both Gary Barlow in his witty, likeable My Take (Bloomsbury) and Chantelle's Living the Dream (Century), which shows the Celebrity Big Brother winner to be somewhat lacking in general knowledge, but blessed with an X-ray eye for human foibles. Being nice isn't a weakness, and family, for all its daily tortures, is also - to borrow Zadie Smith's phrase - a daily miracle. So is every life.
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