ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen the flourishing of the confessional prose narrative in which the author (who is not usually famous at the time of writing) writes frankly about a distasteful or traumatic period in the past. Prominent examples include Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) in which she tells of how she coped with extreme depression, and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’ (1995) which documents the author’s experience of being severely abused as a child by his alcoholic mother. These works are, in equal measure, celebrated for their extraordinary candour and criticized for their perceived exhibitionist egotism. As such they seem at once to conform to the tradition of confessional modern literature characterized by the seminal works St Augustine’s Confessions (c. AD 398-400) and Rousseau’s Confessions (1781-1789) but also represent something peculiarly of our own age insofar as they reflect an impulse within contemporary media-saturated culture – one exhibited most readily perhaps in ‘reality television’ – for habits, fantasies and self-impressions which normally remain private to be placed on full display.