The Sarah fracas is just another element in our current fascination with "reality" as porn. First we had Jerry Springer, but then, as his disgusting display of circus folk became too unreal and stagy, his audience left (although I have a friend who says she tapes it because it's the one place that shows white people acting worse than any racist stereotype, and, so, to her, it evens things a little).

Next, we got higher-toned, prime-time reality shows. Not high-toned, mind you. But certainly higher-toned than Jerry's show. Survivor let us look into the (literally) naked life of a real "evil gay" (the Shylock of our times). Dating shows like The Bachelor let us look at people behaving foolishly over sexual competition with the "but he's looking for a wife" veneer to let us pretend that we're not watching a televised version of a letter to Penthouse. And VH1 and E! take us even closer to the edge with reality shows about a very old pornographer's very young trio of live-in girl friends, or about the skeeviest of scum having sex with the scummiest skeeves (Surreal Life, and anything with Flava-Flav or with anyone who had sex with him).

But literature is above that, right? Except when it's not. And the entire memoir craze is a part of it. Any twenty-something who has lived enough life to write a memoir probably hasn't lived enough life to have a perspective on those events. Instead, the readers are looking for the raw, the real, the immediacy of real, dark depths - the vicarious thrills. They are looking for the porn of pain. And now we've reached the point where fiction authors have to provide us with the porn of the real. It makes me wonder what would happen today to Acton, Currer, or Ellis Bell.