Too much information? The writers who feel the need to reveal all

Marriage break-ups, a son’s drug addiction, sexual transgression … what makes some writers confess their most painful secrets? Are they just narcissistic, asks Blake Morrison, or is theirs a noble quest for truth?

The confessional memoir is disreputable. Critics tend to dismiss it as the equivalent of a selfie, a look-at-me snapshot, a glorified ego trip. Narcissism, they say, is inscribed in the very word “memoir”: me-moi. But the genre has a long history: Ovid’s Amores; St Augustine, Rousseau and De Quincey; the American poets (Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, WD Snodgrass, John Berryman) who came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s. And there has been no let-up over the past two decades.

Related: Leslie Jamison: confessional writing is not self-indulgent

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