The Martyrdom Industrial Complex: When Suffering Became a Writing Prompt

In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche takes a blowtorch to the cult of performative victimhood that now masquerades as literary courage. He sneers at our age of “creative content,” where grievance is flexed like a gym muscle and every paper cut becomes an epic of resilience. “The writing store,” he notes mordantly, “always has victims in stock—a pile of mangled corpses, testicles and tongues slivered onto blood floors, shot at dawn for no reason.” It’s a grotesque bazaar of self-pity, and business is booming.

Marche insists that the only genuine heroism for a writer is aesthetic integrity—the lonely grind of showing up, enduring rejection, and battering down the door through sheer persistence. He dispels the romantic myth that suffering ennobles or sanctifies creativity. There is, he reminds us, “no dignity in poverty,” and martyrdom doesn’t confer artistic credibility. Yet even he concedes that “some of the greatest works rise out of the worst horrors. Glories stroll out of burning buildings.” The difference, one suspects, lies in what the artist does with the fire, not how loudly they scream about being scorched.

Grandiosity, not suffering, is the real contagion. Turning agony into performance is vanity with a halo. The more honest path is quieter: stoic endurance, the disciplined refusal to narrate your misery until the work itself transforms it. True writers don’t audition for sainthood—they keep typing while the room burns.