Confession as Storytelling, Part One

Writing for "huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience"

I’ve been wondering why humans have such a deep need to confess, to bare their souls in search of relief.

Whether a confession happens in a church confessional, on a therapist’s couch, or at an AA meeting, the goal is similar: to find reconciliation, grace. To unshed burdens. To gain back yourself. To be seen in your full truth, your full being.

Absolution comes through expression, acknowledgment. By giving your story to another, you find a new story. Or you hope you can.

I have a theory about the role of confession in the history of writing and how it reveals who we are as a people: the trajectory of American literary history has been all about a desire to get closer to the self—to find the self, reveal the self, unburden the self.

As a nation dominated by a Protestant ethos of stoicism and repression, most of our early literature tended to avoid lifting the hood of the self, but beginning with Walt Whitman’s declaration in Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes,” American literature has reached further and further into the self.

Spurred on by the advent of psychology in the 20th century, “confessional poets” like Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, the Beatniks, and others wrote about taboo subjects such as mental illness, family dysfunction, suicide, and sexuality—subjects “polite society” would rather sweep under the rug.

American readers weren’t used to writers exposing themselves in such a way, so it was shocking, and shock was part of the purpose of the confession for some, but I think writers in all genres have been getting closer to themselves and more comfortable with revelation over the years, which has obviously led to the widespread popularity of memoir.

Confession and stigmatization

We look to others to tell a truth so that we recognize our own truths through them.

You’d think we’d treat such brave truth-tellers with reverence for risking revelation, but the hazard of confession is that instead of finding belonging, writers often find stigmatization.

Many readers and critics are wary or squeamish or just dismissive of anything that rings of confession, and once a writer is ensnared by a confessional label, their work is often minimized as solipsistic, self-indulgent, and self-absorbed.

Whitman’s Song of Myself itself was critiqued as “trashy, profane & obscene” upon its 1855 publication, and those words are still branded on much revelatory work today.

This is especially true for women writers. I think of Adrienne Rich, who lamented the introspection of her confessional poetry because of the way others confined her within it. In her poem “In Those Years,” she wrote, “We found ourselves / reduced to I,” when reflecting on the way she and other poets were treated by critics.

All art is confession.

Even though America is a country that can be characterized as self-obsessed and self-promotional, it paradoxically seems to judge people for being self-involved when they’re perhaps just involved in exploring themselves.

Case in point: a friend of mine recently called memoir the “selfie of the writing world.”

With a poet like Adrienne Rich, her “I” is relevant because it speaks to a larger “we.” It’s an expansive “I” in other words.

For years I’ve quoted Albert Camus, who said, “Art is confession,” and the reason I like that quote is because I think the best art happens when the artist is the most vulnerable, where the artist is interested in revealing things previously unspoken or forbidden.

Being vulnerable is an artistic strength that transcends any craft technique for me. Camus also said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth”—so confession can take many forms. It just requires you to dig deep into yourself to unearth your truths.

“Confessional literature” is a type of wrecking ball, banging down structures of confinement.

Confession as path to intimacy

In Confessional Writing Is Not Self-indulgent, the writer Leslie Jamison wrote about how people sought her out to tell her their stories after she wrote The Empathy Exams because her confessional writing created an intimacy that led to a deep feeling of connection.

“When they confessed things to me, these strangers were offering something but they were also asking for something,” she said. “They were asking for the subject of the book itself: empathy. They wanted an enactment of its central principle, its primary call: to pay attention.”

The “confessional” writer serves the role of allowing the reader to do a type of confession, to experience reconciliation along with the writer. The best confessional writing doesn’t pull any punches—it doesn’t exist in shame and it doesn’t offer an apology. Its aim is truth, and sometimes its literary style is rawness.

As Robert Lowell described his poetry in his National Book Award acceptance speech: it is “huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience.”

His style of confessional writing didn’t seek to adorn itself with the pretty flourishes of the usual poetic lyricism, but to go beneath the surface of the skin.

Our secrets are the currency of intimacy, you might say. It’s intimacy that I want to feel with a story, an author, a human being. Closeness. Togetherness. Openness.

Today’s prompt:

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek,” said Joseph Campbell. What is the cave you fear? How can you turn it into art? What grace do you find in your words?

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Because a quote or two

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

—Virginia Woolf

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

—Buddha

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Because a photo

Sometimes sin is legal. Sometimes it isn’t. But it is American. Hence the flag. Elko, Nevada.

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