Against the Confessional Essay
“Left unrestrained in pursuit of simulated intimacy, the confessional essay flees from both the category of art and the act of writing itself.”
Owen Yingling is a 21-year-old writer from Arlington, Virginia studying Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He writes OY’s Substack.
And the other side of that dirty coin is all of the sniveling confessionals, they are the most infuriating and it seems to be the way the coin is falling now
– William Gaddis (Letter, April 7th, 1948)
In the past six months, four or five unrelated real-life acquaintances have begun blogging and writing essays in what I’d term a ‘confessional essay’ style. Since then, I’ve constantly come across small Substacks which have taken up a similar framing. By ‘confessional essay,’ I mean online nonfiction that seems to revel in describing intimate and embarrassing moments in the author’s life in vivid detail. Here are my own attempts at a few representative examples:
When I got there, I confronted James and said I didn’t want to see him anymore. We cried and talked for an hour, he begged and begged me to reconsider, but I think deep down we both knew that it was done. Then I left. When I got home I texted my friends that it was finally over. The next day, I heard he was in the hospital. I didn’t even cry.
Gina called me later and said she was glad I’d come over to say hi. I said thanks, maybe we’d run into each other again. The next day she wrote that she and John had blown up after a fight; that the drinking, the relapsing, and the constant arguments had worn her out. She said she’d told him that she couldn’t do another round of it — that the next fight would be the last.
I told my boss Matthew that I didn’t think this was acceptable. “You’re done,” he said. “Go get your things.” Obviously it was my fault, but — honestly — what was I supposed to have done?
This sort of display of deeply intimate interpersonal drama, occasionally mixed with the monotonous details of contemporary life, characterizes the style I’m talking about. The main differentiators among these essays are largely on the axes of formality, the mixture of mundanity and luridness, and the particular prose style.
Where did this style come from? Is it ‘good’ or ‘bad’? And, what’s the point of it?
What exactly does the writer get out of this sort of writing that one could not find keeping a personal diary? I think it is the intimacy, perhaps more imagined than real, that comes from treating the entire world as your own private circle of friends to gush and gossip to.
And the reader belongs to the same relationship in the other direction: the closeness and the desultory (though again, quite clearly imaginary) sense that they themselves are important enough to receive the writer’s confession. It brings to my mind the beginning of The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carraway describes being “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men,” because of his unwillingness to judge others. Of course, Nick ends up “[wanting] no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart,” instead wishing “the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.”
If this feeling, applied to the topic at hand, would make Carraway an artistic puritan, I suppose it makes me one as well, because, after reading a bunch of these pieces, I think trying to conjure up this sort of pseudo-intimacy between confessor and listener in writing, has, when pushed to the limit, no redeeming artistic value and can cause significant social harm.
But before getting deeper into why I think this style is such a problem, it might be helpful (as well as provide an illustrative example of the harm I’m talking about) to try and find the historical source of the contemporary confessional essay.
Where did this style come from? Thinly-veiled autobiographical stories are probably as old as literature itself. And it’s easy to think of examples, like Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, in which the disclosures afforded seriously damaged the authors’ relationships with people in their lives. By drawing a silly comparison, this viral tweet implicitly throws out one possible answer: writers have taken up this style because today they see themselves as transgressive confessional writers like Anaïs Nin or Henry Miller.
“alt lit girls in new york with diary substacks think they’re anaïs nin. bitch, you’re greg heffley.”
– @pmoneyy666 on X
But is the widespread confessional style that this tweet complains about and that I’ve noticed both on Substack and in real life really due to people reading Anaïs Nin and other twentieth century confessional writers? I don’t think so. I think the real source is much closer in time and style. For one, as this tweet implies, the content and the style of these recent confessional essays (“Greg Heffley”) are nothing like the style of Nin: these pieces are often mundane and, while emotional, often not self-consciously literary in their use of language.1 And Nin and other equally confessional literary writers are niche, even within literary fiction, whereas these pieces are everywhere (even among people who don’t read much literature).2 I think the real source is a different kind of writing that is much more recent and hews closer to the style of writing predominant in these essays.
I believe the source of this recent trend is actually the personal essay boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s: when trendy online publications had an economic and socio-political incentive to saturate the internet with a confessional style combined with a social justice hook — a trend which largely ceased to exist when the market crashed and these publications stopped buying.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2017, Jia Tolentino, a former editor at Jezebel, declared “The Personal Essay Boom is Over” and attempted an autopsy: Why, for about a decade, were internet publications inundated with personal essays everyone seemed to hate?
Tolentino grouped these essays using the following characteristics:
“Mostly written by women.”
“They came off as unseemly, the writer’s judgment as flawed.”
“They were too personal: the topics seemed insignificant, or else too important to be aired for an audience of strangers.”
In Tolentino’s categorizing, the topics ranged from downright bizarre to appropriately emotion-stirring:
“Body-horror pieces.”
“Essays that incited outrage for the life styles they described.”
“Those that incited outrage by giving voice to horrible, uncharitable thoughts.”
“Essays that directed outrage at society by describing incidents of sexism, abuse, or rape.”
This should be enough to spark a tinge of recognition for anyone who was unlucky enough to read the most befuddling examples in publications like Salon, Jezebel, Gawker, The Cut, or even The New York Times Magazine.
These essays proliferated for a simple reason: basic economics.
“The invisible hand of the page-view economy gave them a push: Web sites generated ad revenue in direct proportion to how many ‘eyeballs’ could be attracted to their offerings, and editorial budgets had contracted in the wake of the recession. The forms that became increasingly common — flashy personal essays, op-eds, and news aggregation — were those that could attract viral audiences on the cheap.”
“Sarah Hepola, who worked as Salon’s personal-essay editor, described the situation to me in an e-mail. ‘The boom in personal essays — at Salon, at least, but I suspect other places — was in part a response to an online climate where more content was needed at the exact moment budgets were being slashed.’”
Eventually, of course, the market for this sort of writing became oversaturated, people moved on, and by the end of 2016, that was that. You can still find and read these pieces, but their overwhelming dominance for this brief moment in the 2010s was just a bubble, a temporary misallocation in the literary market. For better or worse, there is little space today in online publications for essays like Ten Days in The Life of a Tampon or I Was Taught to Be Proud of My Tight Asian P*ssy – Here’s Why I Wish I Hadn’t Been.
From the way Tolentino draws the picture, the move to the sort of confessional essays we see on Substack is trivial: a new generation grew up on these essays and, while discarding the particular millennial snark and topical preoccupations characteristic of the personal essay, imbued the very ‘personal’ relationship they tried to create between reader and writer. Looking back on this particular aspect of the personal essay boom, Tolentino darkly notes, “Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame.”
I think some of this story is correct, but the situation is more complicated than that. For one, it’s hard to see exactly what these new Substack essays have taken from these personal essays under this framing. If people today are writing about different topics than the ones Tolentino describes while using a different writing style, shouldn’t we question if the personal essay is really the origin of these newer pieces?
Freddie DeBoer’s similar retrospective on the personal essay boom of the 2010s in his piece “Writing Today: The Essay, 2010s v 2020” provides the start of an answer. DeBoer defines this genre as follows:
“These were essays in which the author recounted some intimate details of their lives, often prurient or trauma-related, in a way meant to convey broader ideas about How We Live Now.”
Instead of listing out the shared traits like Tolentino, DeBoer offers a two-part structure of the average personal essay: a personal section plus an abstract or political framing.
I think DeBoer’s framework captures the dynamic of the boom as it was in, say, 2013 much better than Tolentino. While today (in 2025) and in the later 2010s, you would read an essay in The Cut like “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger,” which fits perfectly into Tolentino’s schema, the median viral personal essay at the peak of the mania in the early 2010s was something more like “Here’s How Pooping Myself Helped Me Discover The Importance of Intersectionality.”
These essays contained a personal part, which was often played up or made intentionally lurid to attract clicks, and then there was some important idea or lesson which seemed to serve both as a shield for the author and a way for the reader to rationalize clicking on such a trashy article.3
Therefore, the important, and often political, lesson about “How We Live Now,” was pragmatically useful for both reader and writer, as well as for the publications which were more than happy to profit off the rise of “Woke” with a careful balancing act between outrage clicks and social sacrosanctity.
But, like the ramped-up luridness, once the market was oversaturated and publishing these pieces was no longer economically or socially viable, the social justice-oriented half of the personal essay vanished. To understand what was left of the personal essay after this collapse, and thus to find the core of today’s genre of confessional essays, consider the single piece that both DeBoer and Tolentino reference and point to as the “definition” and “the beginning of” the personal essay boom, respectively.
In 2008, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Emily Gould titled “Exposed,” which caused a fervor. The piece is honest and cleverly meta: Gould unleashes a torrent of embarrassing details about her own life, the principal one being her own tendency to reveal embarrassing details about her own life online and the litany of problems it caused for her. Indeed, just two days before this essay was published, The New York Post published a piece by Gould’s ex-boyfriend called “The Dangers of Blogger Love,” subtitled: “What happens when you fall for someone who airs every detail of her life on the Internet? As Joshua David Stein found out, romance can never win in a sphere where nothing is private.”
Stein’s article had previously been published in print in Page Six Magazine (The New York Post’s Sunday magazine), which had allowed Gould to give her own visceral response in “Exposed” to the firestorm she’d created by blogging incessantly about her relationship with Stein:
“I lay there for a while longer. Eventually I read the article, which was, as personal betrayals go, far worse than I’d thought it could be. But the real power of the article, as Josh must have known when he wrote it, lay in the way that it exposed me to the new Gawker regime, which had already proved itself to be even more vicious than we’d ever been. If the article had been published when I was still working at Gawker, I would have been able to steer the conversation that it provoked. But now I was no longer simultaneously sniper and target — I was just a target, and I felt powerless.”
In my view, “Exposed” is the ur-Essay: the progenitor of both the infamous personal essay as Tolentino and DeBoer argue, as well as the new Substack confessional essay.
While it might seem otherwise at first, I don’t think Gould is really trying to get across any particular “broader ideas about How We Live Now” in her piece, at least in the sort of way that the other essays of the personal essay boom would later try to do. She claims to have become someone who realized their hypocrisy when someone she had put in front of the entire internet turned around and did it back to her — the point of the piece, then, being a vivid illustration of the perils of oversharing online. And yet the events depicted are so bizarre and unique to her in particular that it seems hard to imagine the story as giving us a broader lesson. And worse, the existence of the article itself negates whatever this lesson could have been, as Gould herself acknowledges:
“I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I’ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I’m an oversharer — it’s not like I’m entirely reformed.”
The form — a deeply personal, intimate, oversharing essay in one of the most widely circulated publications in the world — and the content — “look at the problems created by my airing out the most personal details of my life to the entire world” — are in such obvious opposition, that I think you can only conclude that the reason this piece exists is, like Gould says, because she’s just an oversharer.
It is the lack of a non-contradictory or appropriate justification for what she is sharing beyond her own desire to do so — to have an intimate conversation with the whole world — which makes Gould the true progenitor of the Substack confessional essay. The implicitly unapologetic framing of Gould’s piece and the contemporary confessional essay are completely interchangeable.
But why do DeBoer and Tolentino trace the start of the personal essay boom, a different sort of intimate writing with a justificatory framing, to “Exposed”? I think it’s simple: the pragmatic uptake of this kind of personal narrative by very-online and often politically leftist publications, with the addition of this broader motive, is what led to the suddenly rampant personal essay cataloged by DeBoer and Tolentino. And so once this broader motive was stripped after the boom ended, we were left with a form similar to what we started with: the form inherent to “Exposed,” which the contemporary confessional essay builds off — upholstering the millennial jargon for a new generation.4
I am concerned about the trend back toward the intimacy of “Exposed” because it amplifies the worst part of the 2010s personal essays — the risk of severe social blowback against the writer — and discards the broader justification (which writers and editors were certainly aware of, given their insistence to almost always include one) that made these pieces artistically defensible. But exactly why is this so bad?
Commenting on the furor created by “Exposed,” Rebecca Seal wrote in The Guardian that it had a “tacky, voyeuristic appeal.” But this is a complete misreading. The scenario Gould creates in this piece is not an asymmetrical voyeurism, but a confession — a feeling of secrets confessed at two in the morning or the complete honesty of someone who feels like they can share everything with you — where “you” is the entire Internet. Both the reader and writer get something from the confessional relationship that is not titillation or just another personal appeal to one’s social conscience. Instead, they get the sense that they have entered into the sort of novel relationship which could not and did not exist online until the advent of personal blogs (where Gould started). The draw of these pieces is that this relationship is one we typically conceive of existing only in real life: between confessor and confidant; between two best-friends; or perhaps between lovers.
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. The form flees from artificiality and contrived representation to such an extent that no form is left beyond whatever would be necessary for the reader to cognitively process the content — the perfect knowledge of another person.
The ideal of this form seems like it would be quite similar to one of those ridiculous IRL Twitch live streams. The video format offers perhaps an even purer method than whatever writing could accomplish because it rejects devices like lurid content and storytelling, which are often a practical necessity for the confessional essay.
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. These pieces can only be art in spite of themselves.
Notwithstanding its bareness as art, the confessional essay can be a danger to the reader, writer, and those people whose relations with the writer are mined as content for these essays.
This form is damaging to readers because the work imitates a relationship between real-life individuals while removing the downsides of in-person relations, creating the risk that readers will use this sort of writing as a substitute for a lack of interesting personal relationships or events in their lives — a pathetic variant on the flights of fancy inspired by writing explored in Madame Bovary or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.5
Inversely, the form is damaging to the writers because it imitates a relationship between real-life individuals, but by way of encompassing a broad group of readers (possibly the entire internet), it distorts this relationship and creates terrible incentives for the writer, in turn. You see this all the time with influencers, streamers, and ‘lolcows.’ Do you really want to be a puppet pulled about by the attention of your subscribers?
And the form is obviously no good for the unlucky people dragged through the mud, even if their names are changed. One need only look to the conflagration in “alt lit” in the early 2010s as misdeeds, affairs, and scandals came to light once careful readers took the time to figure out who was talking about whom in their books.
This is not a new issue: the publication of personal journals and the roman à clef novel both posed a similar problem for those implicated by the writer. Pages from the Goncourt Journal, written by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, caused an uproar when it was first published in the 1880s. Truman Capote’s novel Answered Prayers was supposed to be a tell-all full of thinly veiled depictions of his high-society friends before the publication of an early chapter led to his social ostracism, and the book was not published in full until after his death.
But recent technological advances — the internet, the blog, and the smartphone — have drastically changed the situation. In a moment, anyone can take out their phone and publish anything about anyone, which anyone can read. This magnifies one’s audience, greatly increasing the possible reputational damage to the writer and those they write about in an unvarnished intimate mode. Yet at the same time, this increases the allure of the form for both reader and writer — for the reader, because the immediacy of the text is more palpable than reading a book that went through editors and took years to get to print, and for the writer because they know they are writing for an audience whose size they can barely conceive of.
I understand the appeal of the confessional essay. If you are a Substack essayist, writing a diary to be read by the whole world, there are still measures you can take to reduce the social risks.6 Altering the recognizable attributes of one’s characters, delaying the publication of one’s piece until long after the most sensitive events took place (the traditional mode of dealing with this when writers publish personal diaries), and maintaining a degree of separation between one’s writing and one’s personal life (not directing everyone you know IRL to go read you Substack — especially not those people you’re writing about — as well as refraining from doxxing) are a few steps that can tame the worst excesses of this style.
And if you are interested in ordering your experiences as art, there are ways you can use life-writing as well, as long as your telos when writing is not such an overriding desire to create a sense of intimacy between yourself and the reader so as to negate the art itself.
Writing autofiction, by now the dominant trend in literary fiction for the past decade and a half, is one way to do this — writing in Vulture in 2018, critic Christian Lorentzen identified autofiction as a genre with “books that invite readers to imagine they might be reading something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct. But that effect, whatever the truth of it, is an illusion…the artifice is in service of creating the sensation that there’s no artifice, which is the whole point.” In short, instead of trying to remove all of the fictional elements of your work, you can consciously use these elements to create that effect without sacrificing the actual artificial nature of your work.
In that Vulture article, Lorentzen gives a great and commonplace example of what that looks like in practice: Knausgård has admitted that he sometimes makes things up because no real-life person would be able to reach the level of granularity about describing his own life that he tries to do in My Struggle. Another one used by Knausgård and other autofiction writers like Tao Lin and Ben Lerner is keeping the protagonist as an authorial stand-in but narrating in third person, instead of the first-person perspective common to confessional essays.
I don’t doubt that the young writers producing confessional essays today are doing so in good faith and on the basis of the norms of the online writing they grew up reading. But I don’t think their sincerity is enough to overcome the artistic vacuity of this form and the social threat that it poses: as a potential substitute for real relationships and as an inter-personal wrecking ball. It certainly was not enough for Emily Gould and all of those personal essay writers who “[cried] out for identification and connection” but instead found “distancing and shame.” Yet if young writers turn away from the unsustainable pursuit of intimacy and learn to love the artificiality of the written word, I am sure that some will have productive and successful lives as writers, as those great gods of autofiction — Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and all the rest — have done. And I look forward to seeing them write about it.
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The trend towards confessional essays is difficult to point to because it is so decentralized: many accounts with hundreds of followers writing pieces like “Why do I hate my boyfriend?,” “I’m getting back with my ex,” “I got fired and I deserved it,” etc., with only the occasional piece or writer breaking through to the top of the charts (often for their luridness or style).
It is difficult to find the best proxy to prove this, but a couple pieces of evidence: an Ngram with some 20th century stalwarts, the fact that neither Nin nor Miller are widely read in colleges or high schools (and Miller’s ranking is overinflated there with a book he didn’t write). The closest author to them in form and content that is widely read is Sylvia Plath whose popularity ebbs and flows and is not at an all-time, which does not support the thesis that an increased uptake in these writers has led to the present boom.
Oddly enough, you can find one type of writing with parallels to these personal essays in the obtuse admissions processes at top American universities. There was an era where many personal statements involved embarrassing anecdotes about divorced parents or the student’s background, or even (in one case I heard about) the loss of the applying student’s virginity. Like the popular personal essays, these pieces often maintained a tenuous connection to something greater: intersectionality, capitalism, feminism, etc., but this link always seems like little more than a checked box or a technicality. In the case of college admissions, the advantage of a well-written intimate personal statement is obvious: you’re appealing directly to the admissions reader, trying to get them to see you as a human being in as few words as possible. Naturally then, you use every trick in the book to try and simulate as close a relationship as you can manage, which for many seemed to require sob stories, embarrassments, and a sleepover tone.
Plumbing these depths a bit farther, Gould’s ethos is a fiendish mixture of personal bloggerism and the infamous Gawker (her former job) attitude that “everything is news” — everyone’s location, everyone’s relationships, and the most intimate details of everyone’s personal lives — which, of course, eventually led to the site’s demise at the hands of Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel.
Of course, in Madame Bovary it is the fantasies conjured up by literature that inspire her to take (negative) actions, while on Substack the risk is of substitution-caused inaction. I think this is an interesting aspect of the internet age: our temptation is largely not to do things that are wrong, but to do nothing at all and live out our lives by proxy. T.S. Eliot stated in an essay on Baudelaire that “it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.” I think this gets quite nicely at the horror of this sort of inaction.
Some diarists who had no intention of ever publishing their work resort to obfuscation when writing about sensitive topics. I’m sure Beatrix Potter and Charles Wesley would be shocked by what people are willing to write about their own life online, considering the mundanity of what they kept encoded.
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A lot of these confessional essays also feel unhealthy or unsafe to support. Like, are you okay? Then they become breeding grounds for people looking to justify similarly unchecked emotions. I saw one on here recently where a writer was saying she hates other female writers if they’re better than her, have more life experience, go on more dates than she does, etc, and it was being lauded as this cathartic emotional epic with thousands of likes when it was literally incel ideology
I hope this isn't a subtweet...