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Story of a bestseller: fact or fiction?

Hasan Suroor

The story of Kathy O'Beirne has a lot to do with a market driven by an almost obsessive interest in personal accounts of abuse, pain, and hurt.

UNTIL A few weeks ago, Kathy O'Beirne was one of Ireland's best-selling writers having sold, in less than a year, some 350,000 copies of her memoir, Kathy's Story: a Childhood Hell in the Magdalene Laundries, published in Britain as Don't Ever Tell. It is a shocking personal story of a young woman's life scarred forever by sexual abuse and exploitation.

But over the past week, Ms. O'Beirne has been struggling to protect her credibility and reputation amid accusations that her account is a concoction of falsehoods. And among those leading the charge against the 45-year-old Irish author are many of her own family members. The media, of course, are loving it.

In her book, which at the height of its popularity ranked among the five top best-selling non-fiction titles in Britain, Ms. O'Beirne claims that as a child she was abused and ill-treated, first by her father and then by priests in the Magdalene Laundries. These were a network of homes run by the Catholic Church for girls seen to be in moral danger and unfit to live in Irish society. It is widely acknowledged that the Laundries were notorious for the way they treated their inmates. This has also been documented in the award-winning film, The Magdalene Sisters, made by the leading Irish film-maker Peter Mullan in 2002.

According to Ms. O'Beirne's account, she was raped by priests and tortured by nuns in the Laundries. "I was consigned to a hell of beatings and abuse. It was one long scream of suffering which has haunted all of my adult life," she wrote. She claimed that when she attempted to rebel against the system she was classified as mentally ill and sent to a mental hospital where the abuse continued. Back at the Laundries she was subjected to more harassment and sexual exploitation.

Her publishers, Mainstream Publishing, hailed her book as the first-ever personal account of a "survivor of the horrific system" at the Magdalene Laundries where, it said, she spent nearly 14 years in the 1960s after her father tricked her into going there at the age of 8.

In a pre-publication announcement, they announced that Mainstream was "delighted to have acquired the rights to Kathy's Story."

The book became an instant best-seller because it played on the emotions of what The Times described as "a generation of Irish people whose experiences at the hands of religious orders left them scarred." It was able to catch the mood of the time as it was published when the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was reeling under widespread allegations of child abuse against its members, and had just apologised for their conduct.

But the book's unprecedented success also proved to be Ms. O'Beirne's undoing. Embarrassed by her claims, her family and the Church authorities joined forces to denounce her. They alleged that her memoir was a fabrication — and a "con."

The first to protest was the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, one of the organisations that ran the now-extinct Magdalene Laundries. It said that an investigation by an independent archivist had not found any record of Kathy O'Beirne having ever been at the Laundries. Then, five of Ms. O'Beirne's siblings called a press conference to deny her claims. They accused her of betraying the family and maligning the name of their father for "financial gains." They also disputed that she was ever at the Magdalene Laundries claiming that she was actually with them during the period she says she was being abused at the Laundries.

Her sister Mary O'Beirne said: "The anger and frustration we feel at seeing our father branded worldwide as a horrific abuser is indescribable. The allegations are untrue. If people tell lies for long enough, people will believe it. We want to get on with our lives and remember our mother and father. They were good to us. I don't want to live the rest of my life like this."

The family apologised to those who had bought the book believing it to be a fact. "We can understand that many people will now feel hurt and conned," it said in a statement which also criticised Ms. O'Beirne's publishers for rushing into print without checking the facts. Since then one of her brothers has come out in her support.

The author insists that her account is true and says her family has turned against her because of a property dispute. So far, her publishers have stood by her saying the "memoir was appropriate for publication."

This is not the first time that a writer has been accused of spicing up facts to make them more "interesting" and saleable. Remember the American author who was forced to admit that his account of his addiction to drugs as a teenager and its effect on him was an invention?

Publishers will, of course, protest but it has a lot do with a market driven by an almost obsessive interest in kiss-and-tell stories and intimate personal accounts of abuse, pain, and hurt — or what are known as "confession memoirs." And when so much money is riding on them, accuracy often becomes a casualty. In this case, though, the jury is still out.

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