You Might Be Writing About Yourself Too Much

The confessional essay shaped a generation of women's writing. Has it done us any good?

I tend to be a hypocrite. I decry confessional writing, but I write essays on Substack. I snub wannabe Anaïs Nins—baby deer profile picture, gloating over their eating disorders and detached internal monologues—yet cannot deny the wannabe Joan Didion allegations. My aversion to confessional women’s writing is underscored by my own status as a “woman writer.”

She’s right and she should say it!

I came of age in the fourth wave feminist heydays of the first Trump administration. I was in the throes of being a “teen writer” when sensationalist personal essays about Cat Marnell admitting to only using Plan B as birth control and Emily Gould’s voyeuristic odyssey Exposed gave way to more serious, more self-victimizing narratives decrying [the patriarchy, marriage, cat calling, wage gaps, telling a woman to smile] or normalizing [abortion, “body positivity,” “sex positivity,” body hair]. These essays were backdropped by perceived social injustices against women-at-large; they cited Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the Access Hollywood tapes, and The Handmaid’s Tale as proof. The personal essay devolved from brash, hedonistic clickbait into a one-sided therapy session in the era of #resist.

Placing a vulnerable or indignant confessional essay in Salon or Jezebel came with worthy social and professional capital. Jia Tolentino admitted in her 2017 piece The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over:

For some writers, these essays led to better-paying work. But for many the thrill of reaching an audience had to suffice. And placing a delicate part of your life in the hands of strangers didn’t always turn out to be so thrilling.

These confessional essays framed vulnerability as taboo and personal experience as deeply meaningful. They never wrote to an audience, because they didn’t have to; the writer’s internal soul-searching about their transformative personal experience was relevant to a larger social justice problem that readers could relate to (pussy hat feminism, systemic oppression). The writer never had to convince the audience that their writing—conflated with their personal experience—mattered. It just did.

This, of course, was a terrible time to be an eighteen-year-old newly-minted woman writer. It assumed two truths: that your personal experience was valid and worthy of a very public audience, and that the more severe your experience (Abuse? Drugs? Rape?), the more “important,” “brave,” or “necessary” your story was. Your trauma could be interesting. It could hold social currency. Confessional writing was met with largely uncritical reactions, and criticism was dismissed as misogyny. Entire websites—Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas, the Awl, Hairpin—were devoted to confessional writing of women documenting, often, the worst days of their lives.

Your voice matters! was the resounding battle cry of the post-Eat, Pray, Love generation of millennial and zillennial women. Some insist their voices still do, despite being poor writers, or never doing the work of identifying their audience, much less persuading them. Assuming that your voice matters! is a selfish and, frankly, narcissistic assumption that has resulted in a clickbait cycle of bad writing. The Cut maintains a hold on clicks (and ad views) with essays such as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s saga of upending her marriage to pursue a sex-filled, destructive relationship with her drug-addled friend dying of cancer, or stubborn justifications for “ethical non-monogamy” that always end in divorce. Writers without Gilbert’s notoriety are subject to personal disappointment when faced with the reality that not every story is worth telling: not everyone has a following, not everyone can write their story well, and not every story will generate clickbait discourse. And audiences, turns out, don’t always care.

I am being a hypocrite again: I am writing about my personal experience. I am insisting that this matters.

Writing internally

Who is confessional writing even for?

The confessional writer directs their words inwards. Writers cite wanting to “be heard,” hopeful that their audience can relate. But, to the writer, “the audience” is nothing more than a large, amorphous, faceless ether of cheering women and a few scowling, scolding men. There is no audience to write towards; rather, the goal of confessional writing is therapeutic relief of the writer being listened to and understood. Whether the writer wants their problems to be solved or personal experiences recovered from is irrelevant.

Documenting the shift from the personal essay to confessional writing, former Slate editor Laura Bennett told Tolentino in 2017:

“The political landscape has been so phantasmagoric that even the most sensationally interesting personal essays have lost some currency when not tied head-on to the news…” These days, she tends to see pitches “that center on systemic rather than personal trauma,” she added, “or on orienting personal trauma in our berserk new reality.”

Confessional writing never fully recovered from the insistence that the personal is political. In Writing Today: The Essay, 2010s v 2020, Freddie DeBoer lays out some shifts in the past decade of confessional writing: confessional writing is now afflicted with self-defensive, ironic awareness. The “I” takes the role of the observer instead of the participant. While 2010s personal essays often ended on a victorious conclusion of strength or resiliency, confessional writing now is upended by dramatic crisis and collapse that is never resolved.

But confessional writers have never de-centered their narratives from themselves. Their objectives—of being understood, of being validated—have never changed. Confessional essays still are swan songs wailing does anyone care about me? Does my story matter?, all while the writer insists yes, it does.

The audience never answers. The echo chamber rattles.

“You guys might be thinking about yourselves too much”

It only makes sense that the crisis of the self has become the de facto subject of essay writing. We think about ourselves a lot. There are loneliness epidemics, sex crisis, and exacerbated rates of depression and anxiety. Thinking about one’s self too much can instigate depression, while people with depression are more likely to think obsessively about themselves. Psychologists can conduct yearslong studies to come to the same conclusion that Girls actress Jemima Kirke did when asked on an Instagram Q&A “Any (sp.) advice to unconfident young women?:” “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

Confessional writing is dissimilar to journaling or speaking to a therapist because, unlike private notebooks or HIPAA-compliant doctors offices, confessional essays are extremely public. Furthermore, confessional writing may come with reasonable aversion to the writer. Tolentino notes:

Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame.

This “distancing and shame” may only reinforce the writer’s victimization. Pegging criticism against confessional writing as “misogyny” deepens the writer’s perceived oppression. Confessional essays are still backdropped by liberal insistence that women are victims [of patriarchy, oppression, Dobbs v. Jackson]. Victimization, similarly to internal thinking, correlates with increased rates of depression. It also garners attention that satiates the addictive need to “be heard” or understood. When there is no incentive to believe that one’s self is not a victim of hypothetical, shadowy forces, it is easy, comfortable, and even encouraged to remain one. What else is there to write about if not the crisis of self?

Half-truths, repeated

One of my favorite (not confessional!) essays is Joan Didion’s The Women’s Movement, first published in 1972 and later in her collection The White Album. Didion tracks the invention of women as a marginalized class, resulting in the “ubiquitous construct [that a woman] was everyone’s victim but her own.” She also noted the absolutism of feminist critique, writing:

It would have been merely sententious to call some [third-wave feminist] thinking Stalinist: of course it was. It would have been pointless even to speak of whether one considered these women “right” or “wrong,” meaningless to dwell upon the obvious, upon the coarsening of moral imagination to which such social idealism so often leads.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

Didion’s scathing assertion of “the half‐truths, repeated,” of second-wave feminism—the assertion that women are marginalized victims, and the inflexibility of feminist framework to suggest otherwise—reflect on the state of the third-and-fourth-wave confessional essay, where subject trumps style and criticism is dismissed with the plead that one cannot be criticized as a victim.

My criticism of women’s confessional writing may border on misogynistic. I am not of the belief that critiquing women’s writing is inherently misogynistic, as many women writers pass it off as. Writers cannot give into an egalitarian sentiment that all writing is, at the least, worthwhile, and, at the most extreme, valid, because of the difficulty of the subject matter. Women writers cannot give into this sentiment just because the writer is a fellow woman; this is especially important given the abysmal reputation that confessional writing has given “women’s writing,” and the low, clickbait standards that the essay has been lowered to.

Owen Yingling wrote a brilliant essay Against the Confessional Essay, published last week in The New Critic, which would be disingenuous not to mention. Yingling asserts that the current litany of confessional writing on Substack is similarly degrading to the art of the essay:

Since the confessional essay is trying to create as close a connection as possible between its reader and its writer, the content expressed tends toward pure experience, a thorough repudiation of art itself as an intentional ordering of content. The obvious counterargument for this type of essay is that significant artifice is required to create this sort of experience. I agree. But still, if one imagined the platonic ideal of the confessional essay, one would see the raw experience of one person transmitted to another — the perfect intimate relationship, not really art at all.

Left unrestrained in pursuit of simulated intimacy, the confessional essay flees from both the category of art and the act of writing itself. This is grounds, in my view, for us to remove its purest form from being considered an artistically valuable sort of writing.

Against the Confessional Essay

There isn’t necessarily a place to go from here. Confessional essays will still be published. Liberal pandering to victim complexes will not lessen. Yingling suggests autofiction as a means for reclaiming artistic merit in confessional writing—a recommendation I can get behind. Autofiction, however, cannot stand in for nonfiction. Who will think of the merit of the personal essay?

The issue at the core is the self. Confessional writing writes “internally,” for the catharsis and self-expression with no thought to the reader. “External writing” certainly exists—personal narratives that de-center the narrator from the essay. This is one of the reasons that I love Didion’s work: her writing aims to something much larger than herself, like how she might pray to a higher power. Writing about grief is about grief. Writing about Los Angeles is about Los Angeles. Instead of writing inwards, Didion fits herself into these larger narratives to outwardly address them.

There are also psychological benefits to thinking “externally.” People who think outwardly—and are connected to family, religious communities, and social groups—tend to be happier. Avoiding excruciating self-analysis is good for you, actually.

I do not believe that you should never think internally, or never write about yourself. I am overtly aware that legitimate violence is perpetrated against women frequently, much of which is driven by misogyny. But there is nuance between real, tangible, misogynistic violence and writing such as I Was Taught to Be Proud of My Tight Asian P*ssy – Here’s Why I Wish I Hadn’t Been and Molly Rodan Winter's testimony to “finding herself” through polyamory that can critically argue that confessional writing has been detrimental for contemporary women’s writing. Confessional writing overshares to an unidentified audience, it is unhealthy to the writer, and holds trivial, if any, literary merit. It is the likely industrial product of a culture of therapyspeak, “protecting my peace,” social media, and the brand of self-righteousness that Christopher Lasch condemned The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations—writing that is obsessed with catharsis and gives no consideration to audience. The generation of your voice matters! needs to accept that, despite everything they have been told, it might always not—but the story outside of themselves holds potential.

---

Further reading:

• The Personal-Essay Boom is Over by Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)

• The First-Person Industrial Complex by Laura Bennett (Slate)

• Writing Today: The Essay, 2010s v 2020 by Freddie DeBoer (his Substack)

• Against the Confessional Essay by Owen Yingling (The New Critic)

• The Women’s Movement by Joan Didion (The New York Times)

• The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch