Is Your Novel or Memoir Confessing Trauma, or Confiding Truth?

One approach gets the story out, but the other invites the reader in

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

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Hi Everyone,

As I wait for notes from my editor on my ghostwriting project, I’ve been plunging back into my on-again off-again memoir. And since I’m revising, rather than composing (aka fumbling to get whatever my subconscious wants to put down on the page), I’m wrestling now with the big-ticket macro issues of perspective, purpose, and meaning. That’s why I got so excited by the Alexander Chee post on interiority that I shared with you this week:

Interiority: When Your Editor Says, "I need MORE of YOU."

This process has also sent me back to notes that I received on the memoir last year when I worked with the brilliant Jim Shepard at Sirenland Writers Conference (application deadline for the 2025 conference is Nov. 8, if you’re interested). I was in the process of reviewing those notes when I remembered a related workshop I used to teach my MFA students at Goddard. It had to do with the crucial narrative difference between confiding and confessing, mirroring a lesson Jim taught on the difference between “the sell” and “the tell” of a character’s or narrator’s inner truth.

I’ve found this distinction to be so important — and admittedly challenging — that I thought I’d share the highlights here with you. It’s equally important for fiction and nonfiction writers to master, because it can make or break your readers’ trust in your perspective.

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Confession, or Confidence?

My mind was blown several years ago when I discovered Emily Fox Gordon’s craft essay, “Confessing & Confiding,” in The American Scholar. In this lengthy piece, she took to task the genre now known as Trauma Memoir. Specifically, she nailed the same problem that I’d had with Cheryl Strayed’s confessional essay “The Love of My Life,” which was later expanded into the wildly popular but, in my opinion, deeply flawed memoir, Wild. Only, Gordon articulated the problem more clearly than I could:

It bothered me that Strayed never attempts an explanatory connection between her bereavement and the two-year sexual binge that eventually destroyed her marriage. She does report that in her grief she avoided sex with her husband, whom she adored, because marital intimacy felt oddly like disloyalty to her mother. This deep, if distorted, need to stay true to her mother—the love of her life—seemed movingly plausible: I bought it entirely. But why the anonymous couplings with strangers? Why did her grief take this form? It wasn’t that I required an answer; what struck me as unsatisfactory was that Strayed never asks the question.

Boom! That was such a crucial observation. Question: If the memoirist, who is the primary protagonist and usually central character of her own story, fails to ask a core question that’s obvious and vexing to the reader, what does that make the memoirist? Answer: an unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator is a staple of fiction, of course. And a wonderful device. What would Literature be without self-delusional narrators like Humbert Humbert, Holden Caulfield, or Huck Finn? But the key to success with an unreliable narrator in fiction is the author’s full knowledge and intentional deployment of the narrator’s blind spots. Those gaps in self-awareness become valuable tools for designing and driving plot.

In memoir, the author is the narrator, and any whiff of unreliability is going to spoil the reader’s trust in the entire enterprise. That’s what I felt reading Wild, when I realized Strayed had no intention of unpacking the weirdness of her mother fixation or the form her grief took. I kept saying to myself, Hey, wait a minute! Are you really not going to address the elephant in the room? Do you really not even SEE the elephant in the room? Why should I trust your version of events, then? HOW can I trust your interpretation of their meaning?

Gordon’s analysis that Strayed was confessing rather than confiding her story not only made total sense to me, but it convinced me that this distinction is absolutely essential for all memoirists and fiction writers to understand. For memoirists, so they can rigorously interrogate their own perspective on the page. And for fiction writers, so they can rigorously assess their characters’ self-awareness.

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What is the basic distinction we’re talking about? Gordon explains:

Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores. The fundamental difference between them is that a confession, in the word’s historical, nonliterary sense, is addressed to some entity—God, the court, the public, a person one has wronged. That entity or person holds the power to condemn, punish, absolve, or forgive.

In the case of literary confessions, there is no God, jury, priest, or injured spouse to render judgment or offer expiation. There’s only the reader, whom the confessional writer addresses like an actor who has mastered the trick of gazing across the footlights, creating in each audience member the illusion that his eyes, in particular, are being engaged. Even so, the author isn’t granting the reader a private audience.

The receiver of a confidence, on the other hand, can comfort or chide or laugh or weep in sympathy with the confider, but has no true authority over him. Confidences are offered to equals, or at least the offering and acceptance of a confidence places the two parties involved on equal terms.

A confidence will often contain a confession at its heart, but in this context the confession loses its charge, like a deactivated bomb. What remains is poignancy. Confessions are by nature intense, sometimes disruptive of social order. Confidences are gentler, and tend to reinforce it. Even gossip, it’s often said, serves as a bonding agent.

As Forster famously wrote in Howard’s End, “Only connect.” That’s the goal of all great writing, not only to connect the narrator’s inner and outer lives but also to connect the author’s insights and character with the reader’s heart and mind. Confidence accomplishes this connection. Confession does not.

Again, Gordon explains:

Confidences can be self-deluded (“Don’t laugh, but I think that young man’s interested in me”), but the confider must believe in the truth of what’s being confided. A knowingly false confession remains a confession, but if a person offers a confidence in the consciousness that it’s untrue, it’s no longer a confidence. It’s a calculated manipulation, a confidence trick. [Not a good look in a memoir. Just sayin’.]

A confiding writer is less likely to violate the truth of his own history than a confessional writer, if only because his claim on it tends to be more modest. Often, he is interested not so much in getting it out as in displaying it to illustrate some observation that the reader is invited to consider in the light of his own experience.

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This distinction between getting it out and inviting the reader in is, I think, absolutely imperative for memoirists to grasp — especially memoirists who are writing about past trauma. To confess something profoundly awful that has happened to you— or that you’ve done— is a way to get the experience out of your system, to rid yourself of it, to expiate it. To close that chapter of your life by handing it off to your readers so you can be done with it.

I know this process well because it’s exactly how I went about writing my story of anorexia in my first memoir Solitaire. At age 23, I wanted to tell my tale of adolescent self-starvation, unburden myself, and be done with it. But there were so very many distortions baked into my version of events, and because my main objective was to “get it out,” I avoided the deeper self-scrutiny that might have revealed how much I had yet to understand about myself or my illness. I did not want to confide or invite the reader in, because they might then have unmasked me in ways I was unwilling to unmask myself.

But even if we want to, how can we confide on the page to readers we cannot see or hear? Here’s what Gordon suggests:

The writer invents a kind of stand-in for the reader, an imagined representative who asks the writer the kinds of questions a real reader would ask. Meanwhile, the actual reader, who of course can never be addressed directly, listens in. It’s a three-cornered arrangement. [In fiction, the stand-in can be a secondary character who acts as a sounding board or reality check for the protagonist.]

…the writer depends on the internalized reader as a check against the notorious temptations of an intensely subjective genre—self-mythification, self-dramatization, self-justification, self-pity. In the process of accommodating the questions that he imagines a reader might ask, a writer may also examine his own motives, raise moral issues, explore philosophical implications, make sociological observations. Because the confiding mode is not goal directed in the way confession is, it allows great space and leisure for speculation.

We are talking here, once again, about interiority. When we confide, we reveal not just what we did or said in the story we’re recounting but what is going on inside us now as we’re telling it. Why we’re telling it. What we’re searching for. Why that matters.

Imagine as you write your memoir that you are confiding it to the best friend who will call you out on your bullshit, who won’t politely let you get away with gaslighting yourself, who will actually hold you to account. That is the version of your story that everyone wants to read.

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The events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. — Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”

Sell, or tell?

How does all this translate into the “sell” and the “tell” of character? Well, below is the gist of my MFA workshop on that topic. It’s meant primarily for memoirists, but if you write fiction, especially first-person fiction, I urge you to read on, because these issues also apply to the selling and telling of your protagonist’s inner truth.