Confessional Essays in the Literary Canon
Alli Armijo // Blog Writer
Every morning, I like to sit down and journal. Sometimes I write about the people in my life, sometimes I vent, and sometimes I am trying to work through temporary existential crises. Whatever the case may be, I see journaling as a fantastic tool for self-exploration and consideration.
But what happens when those entries turn into essays, or a collection of essays, and that collection of essays gets published?
Herein lies the conundrum of confessional essay collections as I see it: What is the difference between confessional essay collections and other forms of writing? Does one hold more weight in the literary canon over the other?
When I first asked myself this question, it didn’t take long for me to conclude that more traditional-style literary works, such as novels or short stories, have more influence. Looking back, I made this claim based purely on aesthetic choice. I also figured that confessional essays held less merit because they were more explicitly self-indulgent, more emotional, and more convoluted than other forms of written expression.
However, upon closer evaluation, confessional essays are actually more similar to traditional literary styles than I thought. For one, they are not inherently less valid because they are less visible, or at least less visible to me, in the literary canon. The other claim I want to rectify is that being self-indulgent, or “exploratory,” has a negative connotation. This is not only false, but misguided, as the very format of confessional essays encourages a certain vulnerability in experience and storytelling that is not always embraced in, for instance, longer fictional works. In fact, one of the things I love most about this way of writing is that the author has virtually no obligation to the audience; they can write about whatever they want, whenever they want, using whatever voice they want. In this way, confessional essays are chaotic anomalies. They are about people, their experiences, and their takeaways from those experiences. However, the freedom to dominate a text in whichever way you see fit feels haphazardous to me; there is nobody keeping the author in check, no outside source to verify anything. This is my biggest qualm when it comes to confessional essays. Still, I acknowledge that it is this self-indulgence, this extreme bias, that makes confessional essays what they are.
With this in mind, I want to revisit my previous claim that self-indulgence has a negative connotation. I reflect on this idea with specific consideration to Leslie Jamison, author of Empathy Exams and The Gin Closet. In an article written about her confessional essay collection, Empathy Exams, Jamison defends self-indulgence as an avenue to connecting readers to experiences and emotions they feel in their personal lives.
Jamison writes: “There are many ways to confess and many ways confession can reach beyond itself. If the definition of solipsism is ‘a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing,’ then little pushes back against solipsism more forcefully than confession gone public. This kind of confession inevitably creates dialogue.”
In this way, self-indulgence does not necessarily inhibit, but rather, catalyzes conversation. If one of the primary goals of writing and literature in general is to inspire future conversations, then I think confessional essay collections are equally as valid as any other form of literature. What starts as a journal entry can turn into a form of self-exploration and validation for someone else. Nothing in the literary canon exists in isolation; conversation sustains this landscape, providing a space for stories for decades to come.
Some essay collections I highly recommend: Funeral for Flaca by Emilly Prado and Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif.