A Great Ormond Street nurse has sold 100,000 books in a few weeks by joining a growing trend of writers to recount heartfelt first-person accounts of their own lives

Christie Watson never imagined writing a bestselling memoir about her job as a nurse, much less about her life. “I didn’t think anyone from the outside would be interested,” she says.

After 20 years walking corridors between cubicles and intensive care wards, mostly in children’s hospitals, Watson had plenty to recall – resuscitating patients in cardiac arrest, helping a young boy write a thank-you letter to the parents of a dead child whose organs had saved his life.

Then there was returning to work too soon after the death of her father from cancer. She burst into tears at the bedside of an elderly patient. “He had the same Marks & Spencer pyjamas as my dad,” she explains.

She had kept diaries, and these formed the backbone of The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story, which notched up 100,000 sales in a matter of weeks when it was published in paperback earlier this year. Watson’s book isn’t a one-off sensation though. She is one of a rapidly growing genre of new authors – everyday folk in everyday jobs – that have helped catapult memoirs into one of the fastest-growing areas in publishing.

What’s striking is that celebrities have largely been left behind. Gone are the reality-TV stars, retired sportsmen and ageing chatshow hosts. Now it’s teachers, prison officers, midwives, soldiers, even barristers taking centre stage.

In a tricky climate for books, sales of memoirs in the UK have surged 42% in the past 12 months, to 2.5 million, according to Nielsen Book Research. And that is largely thanks to ordinary people such as Watson.

“It’s insane, it’s not what I expected at all,” says Watson, 42. In fact, her success wasn’t completely unexpected. While working as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital she had already penned two novels, one of which, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away – set in rural Nigeria – won her the Costa First Novel Award.

Then her agent suggested she try something different – telling her own story of life as a nurse in the first person, a “narrative non-fiction” as Watson calls it.

“Because it was a story about me, my life and my memories and particularly about my family and my Dad, I think those things came very naturally because it was from the heart as opposed to from the head,” she says.

The result is a moving and at times haunting first-person account of life on hospital wards.

In one scene, she describes being beside a young boy as he’s having a heart transplant, writing: “I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as Aaron’s heart beating in front of my eyes … The room smells of chlorine, bleach and sweat. There is also a strange sharp, biting, metallic smell, which might be blood … I shudder and focus on a strand of Aaron’s hair.”

It is perhaps the raw honesty of moments like these that have struck a chord with so many readers. They can identify with Watson’s stories in their own lives, a far cry from the kiss-and-tell memoirs of a celebrity sitting on a yacht in St Tropez.

“Celebrities aren’t inspiring any more, and people don’t want to be them”, says Helen Garnons-Williams, publishing director at 4th Estate, which is owned by HarperCollins. “What readers want is people who are normal and who they feel they can trust.”

As a result, she says publishers are now focusing increasingly on these type of non-fiction titles.

Watson currently sits third in the top bestselling memoir list this year, in a line-up that includes just one big name – Michelle Obama, who sits just above Watson with her autobiography Becoming. Garnons-Williams believes the concept of celebrity is tainted partly because “one of them became president of the United States”.

“All of this is a reaction to the shitshow of a world we’re living in right now,” she says. “People want to read about good people doing good things.”

She also believes the incessant chatter of social media has changed the essence of celebrity, and muted the need for A-lister memoirs.

“They expose their lives through social media in a way they never would have done before. In the past if you wanted to know what they wore, what they ate, who their mates were, where they went on holiday, you’d buy their book. Now they put it out there all the time on Twitter and Instagram,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ‘Katie Price effect’ has killed interest in the life of stars. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty Images

Just below Watson in the bestselling memoir list is a character as different to a children’s nurse as you could possibly imagine, former soldier Ant Middleton.

His memoir First Man In has a self-help element to it, says Garnons-Williams, but is similarly tapping into the growing appetite for authentic non-fiction memoirs.

A former Special Boat Service (SBS) sniper, Middleton spent a year in prison for assaulting two police officers in Essex in 2014, an episode which has blemished his otherwise impeccable military career.

His story is a brazenly tough-guy account of “a kid who had a difficult upbringing” – Middleton’s own words – but becomes a leader of men.

It has warmth, though, and while some old-school military people have been critical of the book, Middleton says the rank-and-file have been supportive because it has given them a voice.

“They say to me – you’re letting people know that we’re fathers, uncles, husbands. We’re humans – not just fighting machines, and we’re trying to lead normal lives”, he says. The popularity of the book – and others in the genre, such as Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive about depression – is down to people wanting “sweat, tears, blood and untold stories”, says celebrity commentator and PR professional Mark Borkowski.

“What they don’t want to know is that it’s a perfect life.”

He believes the once dominant celebrity memoir has hit the rails because of what he calls the “Katie Price effect”. The six autobiographies of the model who called herself Jordan is one of a series of “relentless biographies of people who had nothing of substance to write about”.

The new heroes are “ordinary heroes”, Borkowski says, because too many of our celebrities “have let us down”.

Borkowski argues too, though, that there is a financial cynicism behind the boom in ordinary hero memoirs. “It’s all about the finances and how we make money. The real masters of the universe are the agents and the giant publishing houses”, he says. “They’re constantly on the lookout for the next five-minute wonder”.

As for Watson, she signed off from nursing last year to concentrate on writing full time. “It was like losing a limb,” she says. But Watson hopes the compassion and community of the new generation memoir isn’t just a passing fad.

“Nurses, teachers, police officers, firefighters – they might be ordinary people, but they’re doing extraordinary jobs, and it’s about connecting with people who’ve gone through something and come out the other side”, she says.

“There are so many people out there who don’t have enough of a voice in the media or in books or on TV or film or anything. It’s time that they did.”