My mother said these words at least 500 times in the course of my growing up: “Everything is copy.” I now believe that what my mother meant when she said “Everything is copy” is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
– Nora Ephron
“It Happened To Me: I Was Cyber-Stalked By The Woman My Boyfriend Cheated On Me With”, “My Doctor Fat-Shamed Me… And It Kind Of Worked Because It Made Me Think I Should Lose Weight”, “It Happened To Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes And I’m Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It.” For any consummate reader of women’s blogs and magazines this will be an easily recognizable format, one that often forms one of the gratifying fixes we get out of reading these types of platforms. XO Jane sets the bar when it comes to lassoing readers in and making them stay, but it’s It Happened To Me column is the most evident example of a far more pervasive and inconspicuous trend in both youth culture and female writing, which can be loosely defined as confessionalism.
Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s fictional account of a woman’s divorce from her husband upon discovering his long-term infidelity, was self-admittedly based on her divorce from Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame). “Everything is copy” to Ephron in this case was a way of relieving her pain through an exposition of personal facts, but it was also about doing so through the act of creation. In Heartburn she created a fiction, a work of literary value that went beyond the simple act of confession. There could be many points of departure and examples of female writing to trace back to, but Ephron is perhaps the best place to start.
When she started working for The Washington Post as a journalist, Ephron entered the boys’ club in its hey-day. It was the 1960s and 1970s, when the movement was in full swing and when the phrase “private is political” was still its battle cry. More than any other writer of the time Ephron validated and legitimized “the female experience” by writing pieces that dealt with everything from education, to relationships, to body issues, and by doing so in a voice that was irresistibly clever and unaffectedly accessible. It was a way of defining women’s experience in such a way that no one else could do it for you – a way of slipping on the banana peel and becoming the hero of the joke. It made women and what they do a discernible phenomenon that deserved to be scrutinised, acknowledged and placed on a public platform.
And here’s where things get complicated. The obvious difference that separates Nora Ephron from XO Jane is how that public platform has transformed since the time when Ephron first began writing. The act of confession is an everyday gesture now. We are adept at it and it has become a common register we use to communicate with each other and build a community around ourselves. Confession is implicit in every social media interaction we engage in and we have grown accustomed to the idea that our story is in the public domain.
In an essay entitled Whose Commodity Am I Anyway? published in The Critical Flame, poet Virginia Konchan talks about how the move towards confessional writing in journalism, blogs, memoirs and social media, has become a form of trade-off of human capital in exchange for cultural capital, if not actual monetary capital. Our confessions and privacy are a product – “the market’s newest entrepreneurial capitalists sell exteriorised ‘privacy’ (neo-confessional writing and social media exposure) for cultural capital.”
The act of creation implicit in Ephron’s approach to tell-all writing, is that there had to be a higher calling – one that was political as well as stylistic. It had to be well written. The advent and popularity of confessional writing has perhaps seen a departure from these two standards. Time is precious, exposure trumps style and most of the female blogosphere is apolitical. Blogs aimed at women obsess over telling the “female experience honestly”, leading form and content to fuse into one for the sake of sincerity, whilst simultaneously worrying about the viral potential of their content. Where previous generations of women focused on achieving self-representation within the culture, women now focus on selling self-representation to each other.
The result is fast-food literature – it’s cheap, it tastes good, everybody likes it, and the ads feature Eamon Dunphy. There’s something comforting about McDonald’s that reminds you of Happy Meals in the 1990s, your dad looking worn-out, and you know everyone else sort of remembers it the same way too. But you also know that it’s not good for you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to pick up a Big Mac again and love it like a child though – it just means that you know what’s involved in eating a Big Mac. The same attitude should apply to tell-all writing. It’s zeitgeisty, relatable, and often the result of a well-calibrated editorial decision. But you don’t know whether it’s good or bad for you, and we need to know what’s involved in consuming this type of writing, at the speed and rate and which we do so today.
Emily Gould, author, blogger and former co-editor of gossip website Gawker, is described by Vanity Fair as “a sometimes confessional blogger with a sharp style… she [has] that internet thing – immediate readability.” Moreover, she is someone who encapsulates the trajectory of confessional writing from blogs to literary fiction.
Gould worked at Gawker, whilst keeping a blog where she wrote about yoga and took pictures of her beautifully inventive meals long before anyone was Instagramming their morning porridge. About Gawker she tells us that “having to churn out 12 posts a day made me stop second guessing myself; Unfortunately it also habituated me to making snap judgments, which was tricky to unlearn. I fear I didn’t learn anything much about people’s reading habits, or at least nothing that isn’t purely depressing and pretty obvious.” Gould not only is well-versed in the world of online seductive writing – she probably spear-headed some of it. She came to prominence as a writer with her collection of personal essays And The Heart Says Whatever, a diaristic re-telling of New York involving little money, lots of FOMO, and a fair portion of shitty people. Now her first novel Friendship will be published in June by Virago, and for the first time Gould has had to find that “third person voice.” She admits that writing fiction was daunting, that she missed “that dopamine hit of audience response 12 times a day.” When asked about her writing style, Gould somewhat objects to the word confessional as being “tricky” mainly because “it’s applied to women almost exclusively, and there’s judgment inherent in it – you “confess” to a sin, there’s a frisson of transgression there. Whereas men, when they write in the first person, are simply seen to be describing the world.”
Having made her name as a no-holds-barred writer with aplomb, she sees writing of this kind as a force for good, using “the first person as a way of getting at larger truths more directly, and with more obvious personal stakes than is possible in fiction.” Like in the case of so many blogs, the importance of relating a female experience honestly is a belief Gould holds strong to, admitting, “It’s hard on relationships, and on your relationship with your family… The price tag comes in the form of bills from the therapist, really!” She dismisses any implication that there might be a more sinister element to this form of writing – that it sells confessions as opposed to making women’s experience worthy and valuable – “No,” she insists, “what’s profitable is still what capitalist patriarchy wants to hear – some form of ‘I was bad but now I’ve reformed.’ No one wants to hear you’ve lived honestly and are not sorry, but that’s the story I most want to hear and tell.”
And yet, judging by the success of confessional writers such as Cat Marnell and Karley Sciortino of Slutever (who are of a different species to Gould), one would be forgiven for thinking that capitalist patriarchy loves nothing more than to curl up in front of a laptop for a bit torrid confessional female writing. Marnell and Sciortino became notorious for their extreme drug-taking, sexual exploits, chaotic life-styles, and self-destructive behaviours, which they documented respectively for XO Jane and for the Slutever blog. Cat Marnell, who left XO Jane under difficult circumstances over her writing and drug-taking, now writes for Vice and has a major book deal. Karley Sciortino, who rose to fame for writing pieces about group sex in London squats among other things, now writes a dating column for Vogue US, whilst also having nailed a book deal. They deserve it – they are both clever writers with strong opinions and distinctive voices. But it does demonstrate that this type of writing is no longer simply an act of resistance, no longer a way of bringing to light a neglected female experience – it is popular, renumerative and has cultural impact.
In commodifying these diaristic versions of themselves, are women delegitimising what they do and how well they do it? The question is whether these confessional versions of themselves serve the purpose of sharing honest female experiences, or are they simply voyeuristic soul-selfies? The sense of belonging and the sense of support confessional writing engenders is positive for women. “It Happened To Me…” does serve that purpose. But when that exteriorised privacy begins to drift from what is shared to what is gratuitously shocking, the waters get muddied. The speed at which this type of writing is developing and establishing itself means that it still eludes us. Which all the more demands that we question it, so that we can walk away from our reading and writing with what Gould calls “the quality of true unrepentance.”
Words: Persephone Eastwood // Illustrations: Robert Ickis Mirolo
