WHAT makes you pick up a particular book or magazine? I was in WH Smith recently, scanning the trashy weeklies - purely for research purposes, you understand - and found myself transfixed by Chat. (Strap line: "Life! Death! Prizes!" And donkeys, judging by the cover).

Still, it wasn't the cute donkey that hooked me, nor "Gruesome Secrets of a Double Killer". It wasn't even "He came to trim my bushes and love blossomed!", despite the picture of a naked bloke shielding his hardy perennial with a potted plant.

No, it was "Aaarghh! Weetabix seeped out of my eye socket (amazing photos inside)" that made me part with my 78p. I read The Guardian in Costa Coffee afterwards in an attempt to redress the balance, but it was too late. The shame sat heavy in my stomach just as surely as if I'd eaten an iced Danish on top of breakfast.

You can call me a snob - and the husband, gleefully, has done, on several occasions - but I don't think it's that. I, of all people, am in no position to be snobbish about true-life stories. I wrote a true crime/autobiography myself in 2004 (Carrion Kisses, republished a year later as Dangerous Love), complete with regulation "I fell in love with a murderer" headlines and a probing by Vanessa Feltz.

I wrote the book because I had to, not to cash in on a sensational story. As a 20-year-old, I had been swept off my feet by Tim Franklin, a charismatic older man. He turned out to be a psychopath and a murderer (his trial was at York Assizes in 1972; he was out on licence when I met him). He also subjected me to extreme emotional abuse. The damage that relationship inflicted on me remained with me for the next 20 years. Writing about it finally set me free.

I'm giving a reading and a talk about the journey that I went on in writing and investigating the story as part of the York Literature Festival. "Stranger than Fiction: Writing a True Life Story" is next Thursday, March 8, to tie in with International Women's Day.

Publishers used to be snooty about true-life stories. If you weren't a celebrity, they weren't interested. The situation's changed completely now: 'misery memoirs' - I loathe the name, but that's undeniably what most of them are, mine included - have changed the literary landscape, blurring the traditional boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and frequently becoming bestsellers (though not mine, as yet).

I was delighted to have this confirmed in last Sunday's Lewis (ITV1), which featured Owen Teale as a Geordie ex-con-turned-publishing-sensation who was giving a talk to the Oxford Union. When his wife/agent (Gina McKee), who had a string of old lags on her books, told Lewis, "Do you know what the biggest growth area of the market is? True Crime", I nudged the husband, who was holding my feet.

He is used to this - the feet-holding and the nudging - because I used to do it quite a lot in the old days of Morse, usually to point out that the good inspector was driving the wrong way up what I knew to be a one-way street. I was born and raised in Oxford and spotting famous locations ("Oh, look, there's Martyr's Memorial. I used to meet my first boyfriend there") is something I am enjoying doing all over again, though for some reason the husband does not share my enthusiasm.

Of course, the body count in Lewis, as in Morse, is excessive and the motives altogether too highbrow for real-life murders. Generally speaking, these do not have parallels with Julius Caesar or an obsession with the Greek god Dionysus, even in Oxford (I started out as a reporter there and life was never that exciting) but normal, everyday causes such as jealousy and alcohol and money.

Still, let's not quibble. I have yet to see Weetabix coming out of any eye sockets, even the skull's in the previous week's episode, and for that I am grateful. As Thomas Becket says in Murder In The Cathedral (I'm talking T S Eliot now, not a Chat cover line), "Human kind cannot bear very much reality".

That was before Big Brother and Celebrity Wife Swap. Times have changed. These days Oxford prison is a luxury hotel and people pay good money to be banged up there. Oh, and Lewis is now listening to opera. How about that for a reality check?

York Literature Festival continues until March 15. For details visit www.yortime.org.uk Kate's talk is free; book at library helpdesk or telephone 552815