The Textual Confessional:
Memoirs of Societal Taboos
and Personal Dysfunctions
In an era in which the deepest, darkest secrets of individuals are
revealed daily to mass audiences on nothing-is-sacred talk shows like Jerry
Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Ricki Lake, and Jenny Jones, it proves intriguing
to see this urge for public disclosure of embarrassing private facts played out on
the pages of various contemporary memoirs. Traditionally, autobiography has
been the domain of individuals who have achieved great goals or have engaged
in acts of heroism and courage. But in recent years—reflecting the insatiable
appetite of television talk shows and tabloid journalism for celebrity gossip and
juicy details of sex lives and lifestyle excesses—various memoirs have been
published in which the authors confess textually, often to societal taboos and
long-hidden dysfunctions. While the publication of some of these memoirs can
be attributed to revealing personal secrets to simply make money or gain fifteen
minutes of fame, something more psychologically complex seems to be the
motivating force in others: the cathartic impulse to purge emotions, anger and
guilt, or the confrontation with the darker side of human personality.
A classic example of the cathartic impulse is found in Kathryn
Harrison’s controversial 1997 memoir The Kiss, in which the author of three
critically acclaimed novels {Exposure, Poison and Thicker than Water) reveals
in a 207-page account that at age 20 she had an ongoing sexual affair with her
father whom she hadn’t seen in many years. A number of Harrison’s friends
urged her not to publish the memoir, saying that confessing to the societal taboo
of incest would ruin her career. She chose to not heed the warnings, with the
need for catharsis outweighing any potential embarrassment and public
disapproval that might occur. Harrison’s decision also reflects Janet Varner
Gunn’s (1982) theory of autobiography, in which people tell stories, participate
in rituals, and write history in an effort to personally comprehend their
experience in the world, discover the significance of the experience, and then
share the findings with the world in textual form (32-33). Gunn further brings
clarity to what is transpiring in memoirs of confession like The Kiss by noting
that autobiography represents an act of both discovery and creation, consisting
of the movement of the self in the world and the movement of the self into the
world (59).
Harrison’s The Kiss (1997) is highly reflective of a sub-genre of
autobiography that utilizes text as a public confessional as a means of purging
wounded emotions in a long-delayed attempt at healing. With a narrative style
that Jumps back and forth from the past to the present, Harrison recounts the
divorce of her parents when she was only six months old, forcing her and her