What’s wrong with a good confession? Confessing might imply a kind of weakness of character in yielding to pressure. It also intrinsically involves the divulging of really personal details or remembrances. Its traditional, religious connotations meant the confession was framed in terms of immoral and regretted experience. However, in our age of reality TV, tabloids and social media, the meaning of confession today veers more towards a self-indulgent, salacious and enjoyable ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic/Teenage Drama Queen’ type of tone.
This culture of superficial, gossip-worthy confessions is not, as you might expect, contradicted by modern female popular literary and cultural icons of the moment such as Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Meghan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, Marina Keegan, Katherine Angel, Leslie Jamison and Zadie Smith in their literary essays. Rather, what might be considered private trivialities or particularly gruesome, humiliating or personal physical and mental functions often become the sole focus from which the intellectual waves of the essay ripple outwards.
So part of the reason why I disagree with Cheryl Strayed’s opinion, voiced in the New York Times recently, that “as long as we still have reason to wedge ‘women’ as a qualifier before ‘essayist’, the age is not exactly golden” is because she didn’t take the time to properly investigate her more interesting follow-up statement that “and yet it’s hard to deny there’s something afoot. Essayists who happen to be women are having a banner year.” I think there is something about the essay that is particularly suited to expressing the female experience, and for fulfilling the feminist desire to break down patriarchal structures inherent in our language and culture. The ability of the essay to incorporate the female confession into a framework of logical analysis forces the audience into realising what is universal about the seemingly ‘petty’ truths of everyday female experience. And everyone, especially in a time where menstruation is still shunned and perceived to be a ‘luxury’, needs to acknowledge the importance of the individual female experience to society as a whole.
Leslie Jamison’s ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ works towards such an accessible, persuasive and coherently considered feminist thought process. By juxtaposing several experiences alongside each other in numbered case studies, including several very personal confessions of “faint lines further up, at the base of my leg, where I used to cut myself with a razor”, Jamison is able to expose the clear similarities in different women’s experiences of pain, while not diminishing the individual and personal importance of each. Similarly, in ‘Empathy Exams’ she is able to fluidly negotiate between two bodily experiences – a heart operation and an abortion – to draw out threads of subjective truths that are objectively considered: “one was my choice and the other wasn’t; both made me feel – at once – the incredible frailty and capacity of my own body; both came in a bleak winter; both left me prostrate under the hands of men, and dependent on the care of a man I was just beginning to love.”
The confessional essay is also well-suited to young feminist writers because of its ironic self-reflexivity. The personal essay collection often claims itself to be unassuming, incomplete, and dismissible, as in Mindy Kaling’s Q&A with an imagined potential buyer in her introduction, one of whom questions, “I don’t know. I have a lot of books already. I wanted to finish those Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books before the movies come out.” To which her answer is, “This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.” Yet her novel ends on another Q&A whereby the imagined reader asks “Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?” which she answers by saying that “I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tactic approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.”
This statement of a stern feminist philosophy which has seemingly run throughout what is occasionally presented as a haphazard collection of spontaneous musings presses on the reader the framework in which all of Kaling’s confessions exist: that of a hugely successful and intelligent writer whose parodic list of movies that “someone is pitching somewhere in Hollywood” ends with a half-serious reminder of her actual fame and position as a notable comic: “as much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them.”
Lena Dunham also reflects on her own fame and position within the canon, and is similarly half-deprecating and half staunchly unapologetic about her success, even in her introduction: “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth.” Therefore the embarrassed tone of the confession in these modern feminist autobiographical essays are used as counterpoints to the relative position of huge success and progress from which they are voiced.
So each essay relates to its predecessor on a continuum, however the author is allowed, and encouraged, to reflect and change in the blank space between the two. Keegan’s collection always makes us awake of what could have been, Kaling’s is signed off “See you guys soon”, and Dunham’s is subtitled ‘A young woman tells you what she’s ‘learned’’ – each pointing towards themselves as writers in the midst of a promising career.
The uncertainty, and therefore the constant hopefulness, of the confessional essay is undeniably suited to the changeable and undefinable nature of the young, female experience. Go read them all.
