Why this real-life Lolita has nothing to tell us

In O - The Oprah Magazine, they "dare you to turn away" from Tiger, Tiger. Which might be a good idea. Or you could pay the extra quid and get it on your Kindle. Then you could turn the contrast right down and read it with the lights low.

But the lights are full-up on Margaux Fragoso's memoir of love's sickness and sexual abuse. Perhaps it's the literary equivalent of the recent Supermoon, when it reached its nearest point to the earth and so seemed to shine bigger and brighter. Perhaps this is the misery-memoir's perigee, and from now on it will move away. We'll see.

The story is simple and sad enough to be easily told. Margaux Fragoso's mother was mentally ill and her father a remote frozen man.

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Aged seven, Margaux swims up to Peter and asks him to play. He is childlike, amiable, and fond of his animals. Also 51, and a paedophile. The rest is predictable and graphic. You won't want to look. There are the usual caveats: the innocent complicity of the child, the existence of some odd kind of love between them, a love which, unlike Bosie's love for Oscar, simply can not speak its name because we don't have a precise enough vocabulary to describe it. There is sex. There are the usual mechanicals of the misery-memoir: ironical distance, an inevitably unreliable narrator presenting herself as reliable, the tools of fiction deployed as the guarantee of documentary realism.

Disturbingly, of course, Peter himself isn't a bad sort of a chap. He represents an odd sort of comfort to Margaux.

And that is where it becomes worrying. Some truths can't be addressed if they're "true". They have to be made up, and we can't do that any more.

It's over half a century since Nabokov published Lolita and landed himself in hot water. But now he couldn't publish it at all.

Five years after Lolita was published, Penguin Books won the Old Bailey trial, for obscenity, of Lady Chatterley's Lover and a brief window opened in which the novel could (we decided) properly deal with absolutely anything.

The window's closed again. We don't ban books now. We just don't publish them. Marketing say no. Sales can't push it. W H Smith won't have it. Sorry, but no.

A novel, a work of fiction, on the same subject as Tiger, Tiger, wouldn't have a hope. The very fact that the author thought it up would prove him a pervert, a sicko, a nonce; and who'd publish a novel by a sicko, a nonce, a pervert?

Misery-memoirs, though, are different. The unthinkable can be thought because it really, or sort-of-really, happened. Never mind the unreliability of memory; the real worry is that, with very few exceptions, memoir is based on the false proposition that life means something to people beyond the one who lived it.

It's a fallacy. As Martin Amis said in an interview published in The Times last weekend, "Our lives actually have no shape at all and they are just one thing after the other ... it's the difference between a lady's court shoe and your actual foot. Life is the foot."

Books like Tiger, Tiger offer, instead of the illumination of the novelist, a false and sentimental glow of empathy with the memoriste. The moral precision and formal structure of art are missing. The book is a foot.

Misery memoir can't do more. It can't do art, any more than reality TV (a contradiction in terms) can do drama. Only imagination can do those.

But we don't trust imagination any more, and that failure of trust is at the root of so many of our troubles. Once we start preferring the illusion of reality over the reality of illusion, sub-prime follows, Iraq follows, the coalition's war on the poor and unfortunate follows. It all follows. Not Dr Fragoso's fault, of course; she's just the Super Moon, casting light on the darkness.

• Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir by Margaux Fragoso, Penguin. ISBN 978-0-24-195015-9