Female confessionality: content or instrument?

The female self as a case study

A woman writer in 2026 has a choice to make regarding the truth of her life experience. More precisely, she has to decide on the form, shape, and degree at which she’ll express that truth. Categorizing writing by fiction and memoir is a practice at once futile and dishonest – nothing is fiction as much as everything is fiction. How much of her personal experience is she willing to disclose? I’ll be referring to such disclosure as confessionality: both an instrument of telling a story and, on the other side of the rusty coin, a way of engaging with stories, hinged on the belief that everything being told is extracted directly from a woman’s personal experience. Confessionality, in this case, opposes fiction: the truth is served on a ready-to-eat platter in the former, and hidden away in a locket among interpretations, motives, metaphors, and acts of a character in the latter – where the personal “I” is mythologized, fragmented, or even removed from the equation.

unironically, most of substack

Evidently, it’s easier for a woman to attract readership when she employs confessionality. This conclusion is not something I’ve come to lightly: it’s risen from the difference in engagement for my fiction pieces and ones with a higher degree of intimacy and locker room confession –a method I, too, used to employ shamelessly when I saw people have a near unanimous demand for women being #real on the internet– but also from the larger online trends I’ve observed while growing into myself as an author. When the stories of immediate virality are incredibly personal or present as such, sharpened for shock value and lively discussions, the inability to make headlines for a writer whose work is rooted in fiction, or, on the contrary, is theory-heavy, will be frustrating. The allure is understandable, as leaning more into the personal “I” is an obviously faster pathway to the beast otherwise known as ‘literary success’ on the internet. But is it more rewarding?

Take a look at what’s trending: any opinion piece from The Cut involving intimate details of a lived experience, often without consideration, the story about a woman finding out her boyfriend has been dissing their relationship through ChatGPT (in which she calls herself ‘too petite’…) or morally superior exposés of people’s roommates/sisters/girlfriends hiding their Ozempic use. It isn’t quite up to me to label what’s lowbrow and what isn’t –we can each make our private judgments– but I do find myself with a dwindling patience and an ick for violation of privacy in the name of inflammatory, urgently ‘honest’ content, served without the decorum, respect, and beauty that approaching it through fiction or well-researched cultural commentary would otherwise provide. It’s this kind of sensationalism that tickles the brain, allowing the author to evade analysis, responsibility, and sometimes even integrity, as nothing beyond entertainment will be required of them. Emotional relatability is one hell of a drug – I only wonder where ethics go when it’s used as a shortcut to attention. If the new criteria for a writer and a critical thinker is a clickable enough story, who would dare to abstain?

The desire to observe and understand oneself through another is natural; this voyeurism we need to keep us alive and breathing, the brain is primed to seek relatability. The problem takes residence where ‘honest’ content tries to pre-empt disagreement by turning an argument into a personal wound, and it’s not always so easy to tell. From here, a question: have we learned to value confessionality over craft? To prefer it even, as not only does the confessional provide an escape from objectivity and genuine exploration, making it easier for the author to make bold, universal claims (all men lie and cheat; Gen Z women are not okay; everyone is losing weight; etc — see rayne fisher-quann’s latest essay¹) but can be dangerously siloed from its context and the fabric of the environment that propels such opinions to begin with. When you’ve got a high-stakes emotional tale presented as scandalously candid and based on real events, everything else, in contrast, seems watered down to nuance and boredom and lack of idiosyncrasy. And public dissection of self is poetry, no less. This creates a feedback loop, a hostile symbiotic relationship: the writer who feels the need to disclose private life for engagement they otherwise struggle to get and for perceived legitimacy, and the reader who insists on mining any text for the real, verifiable biographical subtext.

Yet we’re missing something here. What separates memoir from fiction isn’t the factuality or evidence of one’s experience, but the form it’s given. What is “I” in writing? And how does it function? In theory, it could be anything, couldn’t it? Our understanding of “I” is pretty binary: either the author telling the absolute truth, or a character being invented. What if it was an instrument of inward gaze rather than factual interpretation of real or imagined events? What if it contained within itself both real and imagined events in an amorphous mix? The self then stops being a content farm and becomes a case study – a way of looking, or searching, or even addressing the collective, as opposed to confession on the page.

Women writers transcending –at times flat out rejecting– the traditional understanding of “I” is not new. Annie Ernaux, known for her mesmerizing work that faces class, gender, power, and desire, that critics would always cite as autobiographical (and she would continuously argue with that claim,) wrote in her essay Towards a transpersonal I²: “the I that I use seems to me an impersonal form, barely gendered, sometimes even a word belonging more to “the other” than to “me”. Ernaux’s approach gives a new meaning to the personal-impersonal pendulum, creating a third dimension: an undeterred other-narrator. She lifts the structures of fact and fiction to move what’s underneath uniquely and masterfully, bending our understanding of what a woman’s personal experience means when used as a narrative device and not for navel-gazing practices.

Confessionality may very well have become a way of reading, not just a way of writing: it is the presumption that self-writing is always accurate, factual, and even earnest (people rarely believe women are clever enough to employ satire, but that’s a conversation for another day — Ivy Wolk has said this better than I ever could.) The way we engage with most writing today is to assume its “I” is the author, telling the truth and relaying an experience. This is prevalent and applicable to pretty much any woman creating today, from the backlash Lena Dunham would have to endure during Girls to the hot girl didion’s pinterest disciple essayist archetype. In all this lies a presumption that women cannot intentionally speak of the world by speaking of themselves — that our narcissism, or foolishness, won’t let us. As Valérie Baisnée writes in her paper I am she who does not speak about herself³: “are narratives centered on the self and those centered on the world mutually exclusive?” My personal anecdote is that, to this day, with my publication listed under ‘Fiction’, I get comments from people thanking me for the bravery and honesty in my writing. Some have said things along the lines of “hope you’re okay…” It is common, albeit reductive, for the reader to assume that a woman’s “I” is always rooted in personal experience – Ernaux herself said, “...when I met readers who often attributed the narrator’s experience directly to me, and whom I gave up correcting: “not me, the heroine.”⁴ Anything else seems to cause some level of confusion or distress – partially due to the inflation of confessional content we discussed earlier, the “I” as the center of everything, and the subsequent discomfort where literacy and nuance are required.

by Jenna Baydee

Confessionality as a genre-bending practice is not exclusive to Ernaux. Take Marguerite Duras, for instance, who alternated between “I” and “she” in The Lover for narration purposes. Or Anaïs Nin, whose diaries bravely shattered (though by necessity at the time) the false barriers between fiction and non-fiction, diary and novel. The asymmetry in reception of confessional works by women versus men is evident, which is why I’m only listing women writers. Another stark, memorable example of confessional exploration to me will forever be Chris Kraus, whose disclosure, while not rejecting shock value and at times flirting with it, is a tool that weaves theory and commentary so compellingly, the “I” is absorbed by the collective and becomes the voice that speaks for us all. I Love Dick (1997) is an epistolary novel years ahead of its time, blending memoir, essay, and fiction. Kraus has spoken many times about confessionality: in her Interview Magazine conversation with Leslie Jamison⁵, she says: “The things that happen to me are things that happen to everybody. They’re not unique. So to talk about them candidly – there’s nothing confessional about it.” Earlier, she says “Confessional of what?” and quotes Deleuze: life is not personal. Kraus rejects the partition at its root, refusing to separate confession from criticism. To her, one is expressed through the other.

What we see united in the works of Ernaux, Kraus, even Dunham as a more contemporary example, is that the “I” is an instrument. It isn’t selfish. There is a deliberate attempt to transcend themselves, turning to the collective exhibit and pointing outward — high quality, considered confessionality does that. The most seamless and powerful cultural commentary always rises from the “I”, but the self is merely a portal to go further and deeper, a democratized hook weaving a myriad of elements together. The weight of self-awareness and objectivity hopefully holds the ego down. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about a lot of the writing we see trending online, where confessionality is wildly misused. Online, emotional relatability is simply the most efficient consumable — there is no denying it. Here, the female self as instrument and the female self as content become indistinguishable by design – the medium can’t tell the difference, and why would it? A loophole has been found: one in which this relatability is used to make a claim, any claim, unfalsifiable. The “I” online is a closed subject in which everything begins and ends at the same spot, where nothing can enter or leave, where objectivity goes to die. But it’s, well, disingenuous.

Important to note that none of this is a case against women writing about themselves: we’re historically deprived of the practice, so I’ll always cheer for us in doing it. It’s essential, in fact, for us to thrive. What I’m wary of is confessionality that asks nothing of itself and bears no responsibility. The personal “I” performs as universal far too often: once you see it everywhere, it’s hard to unsee.

I’m fascinated and excited by the prospect of using imagination, theory, and mythology to make sense of reality and relay it through symbols, plots, and creative use of language. I’d hope that recruiting yourself in a content farm of your own making is not the only way to build and sustain something longstanding. I have been lucky enough to find out, through trial and error, that my preferred way of using “I” as an instrument is highly fictionalized, with reality distilled for interpretation and theory as an invisible backbone, and that my private life shall remain private. Vagueposting, if you will? I have no desire to write about life occurrences directly — being overly confessional has always made me uncomfortable, which took some time to admit as I continued to gain readers by sharing too much for my liking. Now, when an argument arises from a personal event –as it always does for any writer, any artist, any person– it has to undergo dutiful processing and filtering and be worked on until it points to the world and every woman in it, and not just back at me. I feel a sense of responsibility to speak of the world and not just of myself. I’m aware not everyone shares it. Maybe not everyone has to.

by Nan Goldin

But resisting the “I” curated as a cheap cry for people to look at me and love me immediately or judge the people around me has been crucial to my journey as a writer, and a much more interesting path. This recalibration might’ve cost me a faster route to glory and praise, but it has done wonders far more important: preserved my interior and the gravitas of my life existing as something sacred, whole, and not for sale, and equipped me with a more nuanced view of the world I want to cultivate in my future fiction and non-fiction. It is a stylistic choice as much as it an ideological one. The “I”, for me, now serves as a distant symbol of interiority, not a replica of interiority itself.

Many questions remain. Is confessionality expected of women – worse, have we let it become our default posture? Can we, as readers, feel intimacy and belonging with the author without demanding she earn it by stripping bare? And can we, as writers, find more interesting ways of using the “I” in our work? I don’t want us to see our interiority as anything less than the powerful instrument it is. Intuitively, this approach feels more empowering than equating empowerment to a tell-all story where I’m the hero, the narrator, and the critic.

Good writing searches. It seeks answers. It does more than simply spit out a confession and leave you there unable to respond, object, or engage truthfully. With that being said, I’ve joked a lot about spiritually selling out, and who knows if I’m actually above it. Depends on the check, I suppose.

There is so much more to dive in on the confessionality in writing: its gendered charge, confessionality in non-fiction VS fiction, who gets to be confessional and what it costs, “did the journal factory explore” – I’ve decided to try something new, so I’ll be hosting a hybrid online lecture/workshop on July 26th. It’s on a Sunday at 7 pm CEST / 1 pm EST / 10 am PST. Duration is about 1.5 hours, writing experience not required. Free for paid subscribers to club reticent – please DM me for access and link! Otherwise EUR 25. Tickets: https://luma.com/uj77tjx1

See you! I love you! I really do.

1. The perpetual present tense

2. Towards a transpersonal ‘I’ by Annie Ernaux

3. “I am She who does not speak about herself”: Annie Ernaux’s Impersonal Autobiography The Years by Valérie Baisnée

4. Towards a transpersonal ‘I’

5. Chris Kraus by Leslie Jamison for Interview Magazine