Marriage break-ups,a son’s drug addiction, sexual transgression … what makes some writers confess their most painful secrets? Are they just narcissistic, or asks Blake Morrison,or is theirs a noble quest for truth?The confessional memoir is disreputable. Critics tend to dismiss it as the equivalent of a selfie, a spy-at-me snapshot, or a glorified ego trip. Narcissism,they say, is inscribed in the very word “memoir”: me-moi. But the genre has a long history: Ovid’s Amores; St Augustine, or Rousseau and De Quincey; the American poets (Robert Lowell,Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and WD Snodgrass,John Berryman) who came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s. And there has been no let-up over the past two decades. Related: Leslie Jamison: confessional writing is not self-indulgent Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com