8

Stories of One’s Self

Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?

—BROCK CLARKE,
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, 2007

On the cusp of the twentieth century, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had hoped to rein in an aggressive media so as to sequester personal matters and images from general view, except in that limited band of cases that concerned “public men.” This was the only way, they argued, to protect the “inviolate personality” from newly intrusive forces in American society. Many in the decades that followed made similar claims for the necessity of privacy and of privacy rights in a democratic society. These claims accompanied anxious discussions of identification systems and psychological testing, reproductive decision making and welfare administration, electronic eavesdropping and computerized dossiers.

At the century’s end, however, a reversal appeared to be at hand. Something that commentators began to call “confessional culture” seemed to impel the very public airing of highly personal stories and what in another day would have been tightly concealed secrets.¹ Unlike the forced disclosures of gay public figures or the calculated comments of politicians, these were voluntary utterances, willingly offered up. They did not carry an obvious public message or political intent. These confessions, instead, spoke to the heightened value of personal expression of all kinds. Americans, it seems, were actively seeking out new venues for self-revelation. As they did, shame in disclosing private matters seemed to tilt decisively toward shame in concealing who one really was.

The rise of a much-decried “confessional culture” appears at first glance like a fundamental discontinuity from the rights-oriented privacy talk of the 1960s, with its emphasis on protecting citizens from the gaze of others. How was it that some individuals had come to relish the prospect of making their own lives, not to mention the lives of others, an open book? To a remarkable degree, privacy discussions by the 1990s concerned not just the intrusions of authorities into private life but also the extrusion of private matters into public places. The flip side of the relentless exposure of prominent figures—President Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades the most sensational example—was ordinary citizens’ own quest for publicity: their voluntary divulgences of matters ranging from child abuse to drug addiction in confessional talk shows, tell-all memoirs, and reality television. What if we have met the privacy invaders, some critics implored, and they are us?

So it was that at the end of the twentieth century, journalists, corporations, and state authorities were joined by yet another set of actors seeming to imperil Americans’ privacy: willing exhibitionists, happy to dispense with the concept altogether as they foisted intimate details of their personal lives on strangers. Their unceasing urge to divulge provoked philosophers and social critics to issue dramatic pronouncements: that privacy was dead or dying or that “the destruction of privacy is the great collective project of our time.”² The recent arrival of self-broadcasting genres such as blogging and social networking has only cemented the analysis. Some legal scholars would even pivot from devising ways to curb privacy intrusions to calling for laws that would restrain citizens from giving their privacy away. Arguing that privacy is both “so important and so neglected in contemporary life,” Anita Allen for example envisioned “a rescue mission that includes enacting paternalistic privacy laws for the benefit of uneager beneficiaries.” The state of public culture was such that there was perhaps a need and a place for “coercing privacy.”³

What commentators often neglected to take into account was the broader context in which late twentieth-century Americans were moved to “confess,” as well as the way new modes of disclosure grew out of a longer dialogue about privacy in the United States. Americans gleaned important lessons from this history, both the failure of political rights to protect individuals from exposure and the inevitability of classification by opaque bureaucratic operations. Especially critical was the simultaneous establishment of privacy rights and the recognition of their inadequacy in solving the problem of privacy in a “surveillance society.”⁴ Depending on how you looked at it, the democratic citizen was either being extended or dissolved by the technologically advanced, mass-mediated, and data-hungry world he or she inhabited. In a society that knew so much, where might “zones of privacy” or autonomy be found? The search for an answer pushed ideas about personal privacy in surprising directions. Whereas privacy had once been conceived as a retreat from public view, in some domains it was being rethought as a matter of very public self-definition.

Making Oneself Known

The confessional genre, whether in its religious or secular guise, was hardly new in the 1990s. Both St. Augustine at the turn of the fifth century and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century penned what they called “Confessions.” Confessional speech has long served in Western culture as a way for individuals to establish their “inner truth.”⁵ But when surveying that time-honored tradition in 2000, literary scholar Peter Brooks suggested that this method of laying the self bare “to know oneself and to make oneself known” had gotten seriously out of hand. “In a contemporary culture that celebrates the therapeutic value of getting it all out in public,” he lamented, “confession has become nearly banal.” Citing television talk shows in particular, full of “people speaking confessionally about their own lives in ways unthinkable to earlier generations,” Brooks condemned “a generalized transparency, in which each of us is fully open to all others without dissimulation.” That impulse was tyrannical, “a policing of the very privacy that selfhood requires.”⁶

Brooks was not the only critic to bewail the way a discipline that had been part of Roman Catholic practice for centuries—a “secret transaction carried out in the closed space of the curtained and grilled confessional box” set apart from the “usual confines and censorships” of daily life—had become so very undisciplined.⁷ A host of observers concluded in the 1990s that confession had come to define American public life. Volubility about one’s faults and shames, to anyone who would listen, had become standard practice. Whether celebrated or lamented, the trend was clear: in all kinds of venues, people sought the sympathy (or attention) of others for acts that they had previously kept quiet. That American culture had gone “confessional” was so obvious that books on the topic did not even feel the need to prove the point.⁸ Examples were not hard to come by. Televised talk shows, pioneered by Phil Donahue in 1967, took on a more spectacular form in the decades that followed, with guests spilling ever more painful and provocative stories.⁹ Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the same period energized evangelical Christians to merge their political and religious activities, making narratives of weakness and salvation a regular feature of national politics.¹⁰ Meanwhile, twelve-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous ushered personal testimonies into Americans’ public vocabulary.¹¹

The biggest domestic political story of the 1990s for many confirmed the trend. The Clinton impeachment was proof positive of a society bent on exposing secrets. But for some observers the imbroglio was less significant for how ruthlessly the scandal was investigated than for the manner in which the president and his accuser told their stories. In an age when public apologies for national sins had become commonplace, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky alike seemed rather too ready to talk in a register of recovery and redemption.¹² The careful parsing of the president’s multiple “confessions” by rhetoricians and reporters showed how finely tuned such public acts had become.¹³ Some viewed the president, like the nation he led, as a product of a confessional culture pure and simple. “In Bill Clinton’s America,” wrote one scholar, “the intersection of Protestant practice, therapeutic technique, and talk-show ethos was complete.”¹⁴ Clinton “combined legal evasion with the repentant fervor of the sinner,” argued another, while also “displaying signs that he wished to be treated as a recovering addict.” Had the president “not been under the shadow of the perjury charge,” this writer mused, “one suspects he would happily have appeared on a talk show to tell all, to seek consolation in the community of fellow-sinners.”¹⁵

For critics, this kind of self-exposure was harmful in two distinct ways. First, unseemly disclosure of personal matters affronted individual sensibilities as well as public decency. One person’s voluntary expression, that is, could be another’s violation. Similar defenses of propriety and “community standards” had accompanied debates over privacy for at least a century. The question of the “unwilling audience” and a claim on something like a collective right to privacy had surfaced in outcries in the 1960s over sexually explicit materials sent through the mail, for example.¹⁶ “Crossing a border to impose upon the person,” privacy scholars would note, could be as much an infringement of privacy as was deliberate prying into one’s affairs. Telephone and mail solicitations, neon signs, public nudity, loud music, or the sharing of inappropriate information were perhaps not first-order privacy intrusions.¹⁷ But to be assaulted by others’ excessive revelations—to be “constantly exposed to other people’s life stories … their breakups, the health of their portfolios, their psychotherapeutic progress, their arguments with their bosses or boyfriends or parents,” as one critic described American society in the age of the cell phone—could impinge on one’s sense of solitude and peace of mind as surely as could a breach of one’s personal space.¹⁸

The second and perhaps greater problem was what some going back to the 1960s called “self-invasions of privacy.”¹⁹ Individuals who revealed themselves too readily were thought to do themselves damage by failing to recognize the important distinction between personal and public life. In this analysis, the outflow of personal stories in the 1990s signified a character problem: a troubling borderlessness between intimate thoughts and deeds, on the one hand, and their recounting, on the other. To some, Americans’ very capacity for inwardness and introspection—what Peter Brooks described as the “privacy that selfhood requires”—appeared in jeopardy.²⁰ Worry about citizens’ willingness to cede their privacy was thus the uneasy companion to concern about intrusions by powerful authorities. Bewailing the confessional impulse in American life, some commentators wondered if citizens had ever cared about privacy to begin with.

Observers had in fact periodically fretted over Americans’ tendency to disclose more than they ought, as well as to seek to know more than they should. That had been one response to the arrival of postcards in the 1870s, and their apparent lack of concern with who might have access to private communications. In more sustained form, the complaint accompanied the rise of tabloid journalism. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis spied dangers to privacy not merely in the intrusions of photographers and reporters but also in a coarsened and trivialized public sphere awash in citizens’ peccadilloes and foibles. Believing that readers’ “demand” for gossip was stimulated by the press, they sought to staunch its effects on public morality. Warren and Brandeis in 1890 targeted the media, but they sensed the lure of self-disclosure for the discloser and the audience alike.

The same recognition underlay the success of True Story Magazine, a publication created by physical culture enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden in 1919 that circulated the “authentic secrets” of ordinary Americans. A cornerstone of the emerging “confession industry,” it was soon plagued by imitators.²¹ Debates over how much revelation was too much—whether of one’s body, biography, emotions, or secrets—were provoked not just by the press and publishers but also by new styles of public comportment at urban dance halls and other mass amusement sites of the early twentieth century, by the social uses of the telephone in the 1920s, by the vogue of psychoanalysis in the 1940s, by the emergence of confessional poetry in the Cold War era, and by the counterculture’s embrace of more casual modes of self-expression in the 1970s.²² Each of these developments in its turn seemed to threaten established conventions of propriety, violating the border between public and private affairs. The premium on personal disclosure in the twentieth century thus had deep roots. Why then, did American culture suddenly appear to “go confessional” only in its final decades?

A number of trends, some long in the making, conspired to make private matters newly prominent in public forums in the 1980s and 1990s. They were the work of both the political Left and Right and both religious and secular culture. The growing presence of evangelical Protestantism in the postwar United States was one important source. Whereas the modern Catholic tradition of confessing one’s sins was an expressly private act, public testaments of conversion and religious revivals had been integral aspects of Protestant practice in America from the beginning.²³ In the twentieth century the confessional form, wherein individuals stood before a congregation to voice their transgressions, would gain a wider audience.

Radio ministry starting in the 1920s and its televised counterpart by the 1950s transmitted the practice of confession into American hearts and homes, and preachers with an extensive national following like Oral Roberts and Billy Graham popularized it. Graham’s televised “crusades” to bring sinners redemption were major cultural events, with regular programming often canceled to cover them—drawing audiences rivaling those for other media spectacles such as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. After 1960, when federal restrictions on religious programming changed, “confession-oriented programming became the most visible, the most aggressive, the most familiar of all religious broadcasts.” The practice of public testifying, Susan Wise Bauer notes, “moved from church to airwaves, and then, sideways, from sacred airwaves to secular programming.”²⁴ During the 1980s, a surge of televangelists, led by figures like the husband-and-wife team of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, prodded guests “to reveal more and more about their private lives, their sins and shortcomings” in order to engage and hold their broad television audiences as much as to convert them.²⁵

Secular confessions can be traced to the strength and spread of a therapeutic approach to personal problems that had expanded from its postwar purchase to infiltrate every cranny of U.S. culture. A new vocabulary of the self moved into political discourse in the second half of the twentieth century, such that mental fitness, authentic emotion, and self-interrogation all came to matter in public life.²⁶ Contemporary commentators pointed to the grip of Freudian theory, which held that discovering—and talking about—the hidden truths of one’s personal history, especially of one’s childhood, held the key to emotional well-being and psychic health.²⁷ The rapid growth in those seeking counseling in the postwar United States, therapists’ emphasis on the hard work of self-knowledge, and radio’s and television’s amenability to the therapeutic mode all played a part in building a psychological society. What seemed most distinctive in its later twentieth-century manifestation was the way therapy seemed to flow outward, such that highly personal narratives of suffering and healing infused public culture.²⁸

In the later 1970s, the most remarked-on instance of this impulse to “open up” was the emergence of group therapy and “human potential” or encounter groups, in which individuals loosened their inhibitions as part of their quest for personal transformation.²⁹ Openness and directness were the currency of this movement, which encouraged people to find self-acceptance by sharing their deepest struggles within a safe circle of others.³⁰ To doubters, the point was to “invite people to collaborate in their own exposure—and frequently their humiliation as well.”³¹ Much like television viewers’ attachment to the Louds, a critic argued in the Wall Street Journal, such practices made evident that “the inner self is no longer sacrosanct and that the intimate lives of strangers constitute meaningful emotional experiences for those to whom they are revealed.” Reporting from California’s Esalen Institute, where people came “precisely for the purpose of making public their private selves, of disclosing to total strangers their covert fantasies, their angers, their delights,” she believed that “this exercise in total undress” revealed that privacy had “become a negative value, the unmistakable opponent of the ‘openness’ that is here equated with the realization of human potential.”³²

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the most popular site for such confessions, however, was surely the televised talk shows that were taking over the airwaves. TV hosts like Phil Donahue acted in the guise of counselors extracting secrets from television guests so as to banish those secrets’ power over their holders. Beginning in 1986, the Chicago-based Oprah Winfrey fused the links among confessional discourse, television, and sales as did no other media personality, such that the televised talk show became identified first and foremost as a “vehicle of personal transformation.”³³ Guests on the Oprah Winfrey Show, speculates one scholar, appeared on the program precisely “because of their belief in the curative potential of TV talk, in the form of public confession.”³⁴ The host herself, who described the show as “a ministry,” would eventually brand its distinctive blend of uplift, self-help, “inner revolution,” and consumerism as “Change Your Life TV.”³⁵

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, themselves inflected by the psychological currents of the age, were yet another factor propelling personal stories into public fora.³⁶ The reorientation of politics around identity categories and toward questions of damage and status, theorists have speculated, shifted the way publics in postindustrial democracies operated.³⁷ In the new “life politics” of late modernity, truth-telling in the form of personal narratives was a means of critiquing what many saw as the crippling falsehoods of American society.³⁸ Confessing was understood as an act not solely of individual redemption but also of social politics and protest, most notably in feminist consciousness-raising groups. For this reason, privacy claims had—in both the women’s and gay liberation movement—been subject to considerable suspicion. In some arenas, the claim looked like a cover for exploitation, rendering some voices and subjects unknowable.

By the 1990s, the longer-term consequences of these developments were becoming evident. The quest for authenticity in relationships and the post-1960s critique of authority were still palpable forces in American life, but they now often appeared decoupled from an explicit collective politics. For example, the once politically motivated “coming-out moment” for gay Americans served by the 1980s and 1990s a largely subjective purpose linked to “feelings of self-worth and self-fulfillment,” notes historian Heather Murray. As one advisor on the practice urged in 1990, coming out was “the first step in liberating yourself to be a whole, complete, and powerful adult—the authority figure in your own life.”³⁹ Emotional satisfaction and closure, forms of personal rather than social transformation, were the new rewards of revelation. Although some gay Americans, reflecting on their pre-Stonewall days, missed the sense of belonging to a hidden subculture, more and more seemed to feel the tug of confession, disclosing their true identities to friends and family members to foster genuine bonds.⁴⁰ As gay citizens made the transition from “secret to known, even formalized, selves,” writes Murray, gay expressive culture became marked by autobiographical accountings and explanations. The personal was, above all, to be “named and talked about.”⁴¹

Yet only the fact that personal disclosures still carried a political charge, and still held the power to disrupt, can fully explain what made “confession” both so resonant and so reviled in the late twentieth century. The ownership of one’s story and the desire to tell it were often trivialized. But the amount of attention such narratives captured in American political culture suggests that the impulse to reveal oneself in talk, on television, in print, or online was not in fact trivial. When critics denounced a topsy-turvy world in which the most private of matters received the most public of vettings or argued that some of the most important privacy invasions of the age were self-inflicted, they implied a deficiency in both public culture and private life. What they responded to was nothing so simple as an urge to share. Confessional culture, 1990s style, had many taproots: the media forms and celebrity culture that made self-publicity so alluring, the critique of secrets that was transforming political culture, and the incitements to authenticity and redemption emanating in equal measure from the couch and congregation. But it found ground as well in Americans’ sense that they lived, inescapably, in a society that knew too much about them already.

Bearing and Baring All

In 1974, the cameras having decamped, the controversy over An American Family subsiding, and the Louds moving on to life beyond the show, the family’s matriarch published her autobiography. Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story relied “entirely on the notoriety of the television show, and Pat Loud’s subsequent celebrity, as its raison d’être.”⁴² The book is indeed only conceivable in the wake of the broadcast, Pat’s story notable because her privacy had already been breached, her life already exposed. In its pages she mused wryly about the effects of that publicity: “Most people become famous for a reason. They develop a vaccine, or cross the ocean on a raft, or star in a movie, or embezzle a lot of money or … or … or. But we, the Louds, Pat, Bill, and our five kids, managed to get famous without doing a thing except giving our permission for PBS to follow us around with a camera for a while—to lend our lives for seven months to the making of An American Family. And it seems that if you’re on TV, you’re famous, and free game in a weird way, no matter what you’re on TV for.”⁴³

Pat Loud, along with the rest of her brood, had of course been roundly criticized for their part in exposing themselves. Relying on a set of psychological experts, Time magazine suggested that the Louds were “symptomatic of a cultural ‘compulsion to confess’ ” and that parading their troubles in the mass media was just another species of therapy.⁴⁴ Likewise, a writer for the New York Times opined that the Louds were just like other, lesser-known people trying to “solve personal problems in public,” flocking, for instance, to encounter groups in an attempt to fix what ailed them.⁴⁵ As Pat surely knew, her decision to surrender still more of her secrets in print would draw similar censure. But it was 1974, and she had already allowed her family to come apart on public television before millions. So, “since we’re letting it all hang out” as she put it, Pat detailed—often with winning humor—her upbringing, her marriage in 1950, her love for her children but also her loneliness in being a housewife, her discovery of her husband’s infidelity (“in ’66 the whole thing blew up”), the course of Bill’s affairs (and her own, offered without much elaboration, but the mere fact of them a bold admission), her resulting depression and sessions with a psychiatrist, her visits to lawyers to initiate divorce proceedings and then to halt them, and her postdivorce dating life.⁴⁶ In doing so, the woman who inadvertently became one of television’s first reality stars placed herself on the leading edge of yet another cultural phenomenon.

Pat Loud’s autobiography, even if it now seems rather chaste, is a recognizable contribution to a new breed of memoir—or, at least, a new emphasis within memoir writing on offering up one’s most closely held secrets.⁴⁷ In the pages of Pat Loud, we can glimpse the lineaments of a genre that would overtake the publishing market in the final decade of the twentieth century.⁴⁸ Confessional memoirs—termed “redemption memoirs” by one critic, and “traumatic memoirs” by another—were crafted from the author’s intimate pains and triumphs.⁴⁹ Culturally, they were of a piece with other forms of popular revelation, the talk show as well as the “coming out” moment. These highly personal narratives chronicled distress, damage, and abuse (sometimes self-inflicted) and typically also how such hardships were overcome.

The ascent of the confessional memoir told a bigger story too, shining a light on the peculiar status of privacy at the century’s end. It arrived, after all, in a period when many citizens took for granted that they lived under the watchful eye of both state and society. Not just instant celebrities like Pat Loud but also ordinary Americans in the 1970s came to understand their lives as recorded for the benefit of strangers. Any number of agencies, known and unknown, gathered and housed pieces of their history in databases and files—whether to advance them credit and insurance, record educational achievement, or track health and retirement benefits. It cannot be a coincidence that some individuals began displaying their own lives very publicly in these same years. Meant not to pin down identity but to illuminate it, the confessional memoir was nevertheless bound up with these trends. Memoirists exposed themselves, but on their own terms. They put revelation in the service not of regulation but of self-realization.

The personal narratives that would soon fill publishing houses and bookstores stood apart from older forms of self-narration like diary keeping, usually meant for the author alone rather than an audience of strangers. They also differed from standard autobiography. Autobiographical writing is, one scholar writes, “always a gesture toward publicity, displaying before an impersonal public an individual’s interpretation of experience.”⁵⁰ Indeed, public figures, from the early American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin to the African American intellectual and leader of Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington, and from the blind teacher Helen Keller to the immigrant novelist Mary Antin, had in the past shared their histories in order to inspire and instruct. From the early nineteenth century on, publishing one’s life story was a familiar genre for lesser-known narrators too, whose personal experiences generated curiosity and sometimes a profit in a thriving print culture; beggars, criminals, captives, soldiers, and fugitives all peddled their stories.⁵¹ The slave narrative became a genre unto itself in the same era. There the telling of a life served larger political ends, mobilizing abolitionist sympathies and often—reversing the autobiographical tradition of famous men—propelling a hitherto unknown writer onto a public platform.⁵²

Whether authored by little- or well-known Americans, these works stressed public actions and events and the biographical incidents, character traits, or personal aspirations that shaped them. They did not typically hinge on divulging intimate secrets. On the contrary, most steered clear of the author’s “private” life. Frederick Douglass included only cursory discussions of his childhood in slavery before he set out into the public world. And even in a careful reading of Up from Slavery (1901), one could miss that Booker T. Washington was married three times and fathered three children. Late twentieth-century memoirs, by contrast, made such matters—and far more sensitive ones—their soul and substance. In the process, the very definition of what constituted a memoir shifted. The term, notes critic Ben Yagoda, had once been reserved for reminiscences about notable persons, with the author merely a character and observer. The new-style memoir was instead “resolutely focused on the self.”⁵³

In hers, Pat Loud recorded for public consumption aspects of her biography—love and sex, depression and counseling—to which not even her viewing audience had been privy. Once again, reviewers were not particularly kind. To some, Pat’s life story appeared flimsy and potted, modeled on well-worn commercial formulas. The Washington Post called it “a composite of those flashy best-sellers the public buys in carload lots and the more cultivated reviewers regularly denounce as libels on American life.”⁵⁴ Others spied more profound cultural developments at work. Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times, although he judged Pat intelligent and articulate, read the autobiography as the product of an age in which “self-exposure” was the rage, with Americans confusing “the two-dimensional illusion for the three-dimensional reality.” Putting her book in the company of contemporary phenomena such as nude streaking and theatrical politics, he described Pat as angry and hurt by her experience before the camera, yet “strangely elated by the instant celebrity.” It was a hallmark of the times, Kirsch believed, that “seeing ourselves exposed is a way of establishing our identities.”⁵⁵

Pat Loud’s memoir may indeed have been an act of identity making. She did not, however, frame her memoir in those terms. Pat made clear instead that a central reason for writing the book was to correct “the impressions the television camera left.”⁵⁶ No longer the object of a film and at the mercy of a director’s gaze, Pat leveraged celebrity in order to exercise some control over the story of her life. She also needed the money. Her divorce final and short on funds, Pat explained that she had broken her vow of “purity of motive” regarding the television series and was determined to capitalize in any way possible on her newfound—but she recognized, temporary—notoriety. “We are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame brought us by the series,” Pat admitted. The family had even auctioned off “a weekend with the Louds” for the local public TV channel (“a nice-sounding couple who got us for $210 is coming to stay,” she remarked).⁵⁷ The memoir was surely part of that campaign.⁵⁸

Already, however, there were “fewer and fewer talk shows. It won’t be long before they’re saying, Pat who?”⁵⁹ This was less a lament—as her critics would have it—than a pragmatic reckoning about how much more she might eke out of her fame. In fact, as time passed, Pat became the most reticent of all the Louds regarding An American Family.⁶⁰ In 1982, she declined to talk about the series to a reporter, saying, “I just don’t want any of that.”⁶¹ Even as she unburdened her sex life in the 1974 autobiography, Pat fantasized about regaining her privacy. Its final chapter charts her moving away from a town that knew too much about her to New York City, where “nobody knows anybody else” and “you have privacy, you can get lost in the crowds.”⁶² Pat Loud claimed, anyway, to want an “all private” existence, where “nobody knows what we’re doing.”⁶³ Her desire for privacy, and specifically for a place where she could be unknown, challenges easy assumptions about the inducements and aftereffects of a publicized life.

For all that, there was something undeniably transformative for Pat Loud in choosing to open up her own life and that of her family in the early 1970s. This much is evident in her brief musings on women’s liberation in her memoir and even in its subtitle. Hers was, after all, “a woman’s story,” and the press coverage of the book focused on its most au courant aspects: “single motherhood, divorce, sexual liberation, and the women’s movement.”⁶⁴ Underwriting the late twentieth-century memoir was the legacy of feminism and its insight that personal harms were profoundly enmeshed in power relations—requiring painful excavation and publicity to exorcise. Although Pat claimed she felt “too old” to be part of the women’s liberation movement, she grasped the affinities between her life and the cause. Sending tentative feelers out to the revolution in gender roles, she understood that letting loose her marital woes, treating them as neither shameful nor secret, entailed seeing them as something more than mere individual injury or failure. In this way, her autobiography—no matter the harsh reviews—partook of a broader turn to personal narrative as a route to analyzing one’s own social formation. If this meant dispensing with old strictures regarding talking about personal matters, so be it.

In the 1970s, even Betty Ford didn’t say all that was on her mind or reveal everything about herself. In a memoir published in 1978, The Times of My Life, she discussed topics ranging from her physical attraction to her husband to problems with her prosthetic breast.⁶⁵ The cultural proscriptions on talking about bodily, sexual, and medical matters were clearly loosening. But Ford made no reference to a facet of her biography that was for her still more private as well as shameful—her addiction to painkillers and alcohol—even though suspicions had been raised on this score during her time in the White House.⁶⁶ Only years later would she append a chapter dealing with her substance abuse. It was not until 1987, and the writing of a second memoir, titled Betty: A Glad Awakening, that she would tell this story in full.⁶⁷ In the meantime, the former First Lady had founded a treatment facility, the Betty Ford Center, and become the most visible spokesperson in the nation on the problems of substance abuse and addiction.⁶⁸ Reflecting on the evolving shape of her autobiography, she explained, “The first book was on the outside—about people, places, and things. This book came very much from the inside.”⁶⁹

In this decade-long journey from relating her “outer” story to resolving to tell her “inner” one, Ford traced a path that others would follow. By the late 1980s, others too were beginning to divulge the darkest, most painful details of their lives in print. The most thorough scholar of the memoir, Ben Yagoda, finds that up until the late 1960s, nearly all works in that category presented their subjects in a positive light. While a handful of personal narratives on mental illness and addiction did appear in the early postwar decades, they were almost always fictionalized or written under pseudonyms.⁷⁰ Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar of 1963, published under the name of Victoria Lucas, was a case in point.

However, “like many other things … autobiography broke loose in the middle and late 1960s.” A trickle of wrenching firsthand accounts, named and narrated as such, began to appear. African American memoirists were among the first to offer their searing personal histories to the reading public.⁷¹ Dick Gregory and Malcolm X, Anne Moody and Maya Angelou, all mined the “trauma of their pasts” in order to bear witness to the harms of the American racial order.⁷² Holocaust memoirists followed suit, offering testimony about and finding a reading audience for lives marked by tragedy and sometimes transcendence.⁷³ The floodgates then opened to a stream of memoirs by “minor celebrities” in the mid- to late 1970s. These typically focused less on social or political traumas than domestic ones.⁷⁴ The best known, Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (1978), offered a no-holds-barred portrait of the actress Joan Crawford from the perspective of her estranged daughter in the same year that Betty Ford published The Times of My Life.

Mining the damaging dramas of personal and family life would become the memoir’s métier. Across the next decade or so, the genre would take on its distinctive contemporary shape. By the 1990s, the ranks of memoirists had increased far beyond the “minor celebrities” of the 1970s. And prior levels of frankness would be surpassed, with books pouring out on childhood abuse, mental illness, family dysfunction, sex addiction, physical disfigurement, grief, alcoholism, drug abuse, and incest.⁷⁵ Critics turned to William Styron’s 1990 “unexpected best seller” and memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, as one origin point for what they labeled the “memoir boom.”⁷⁶ In it, Styron, a successful author, divulged the self-loathing, anxiety, confusion, and dread that took hold of him suddenly at age 60. He explained his decision to write about his crippling depression as a desire to overcome public ignorance of the illness. “My need to communicate,” he reflected, “overrode the risks of self-exposure.”⁷⁷ While it is impossible to catalog all the other motives that led memoirists to dissect their own lives for the reading public, a quest for fame, visibility, and more book contracts surely played a large role, as critics suspected. But a therapeutic quest for “closure,” an interest in unmasking power in family and sexual relationships, and—less noticed at the time—a desire to renarrate an already-told life were also recurring themes.

Changes in the commercial publishing industry were part of the explanation for the warm reception of such narratives. With television coverage one of the best ways to boost sales, the promotion of books was increasingly keyed to talk shows—themselves a leading factor in fostering a culture of self-revelation by placing “ordinary people and their problems in the spotlight.”⁷⁸ Media scholar Joshua Gamson writes that the promotion of “the guest-who-is-expert-in-her-own-life” was “indebted to a talk show ideology and format in which emotional experience is the most respected reality” and in which “getting people to talk revealingly and personally” was the primary draw for the audience.⁷⁹ Indeed, the publishing industry rule-of-thumb was that the best way for a book to get noticed was through the hook of “a dramatic or unusual personal story.” As one editor instructed Vanity Fair readers as to why memoir trumped fiction in the marketplace, “You can send the ‘I’ out on tour.”⁸⁰ Early TV hosts like Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Montel Williams, as surely as Oprah Winfrey’s book club, were behind the flurry of memoirs by the 1990s. The commodification and salability of personal suffering—the evident financial, rather than simply psychological, rewards of unburdening—also account for some of the sharp criticism directed at the genre.

But a hunger for realness and authenticity in print drove the memoir boom as well. The new confessional narratives were much like documentaries in their piercing of facades and their search for raw truths.⁸¹ They built on the new esteem for personal transparency. The cofounder of Random House estimated that when he entered the publishing business in the 1920s, fiction had outsold nonfiction by four to one. By the late twentieth century, he observed, “that ratio is absolutely reversed.”⁸² In 2000 a scholar supplied more evidence for the appeal of the real. “Although it is unclear whether the market has led or followed,” she observed, “market demand currently encourages marketing practices such as subtitling an author’s first book ‘a memoir’ when in previous years it might have been classified as fiction.”⁸³ What was abundantly obvious was that many were finding their voices by confessing. “The triumph of memoir is now established fact,” pronounced a critic in 1996, with even academics getting into the act by using personal pronouns in their scholarly writing and penning “moi criticism.”⁸⁴ Americans had clearly, and volubly, plunged into “the Age of Memoir.”⁸⁵ The 1990s would be both known and scorned as “the decade of revelation.”⁸⁶

In this era, writes Ben Yagoda, there was “none of the coyness or veiling strategies” that had marked earlier memoirists’ treatment of their most private moments. Instead, “authors faced the camera straight on and told the truth—the more unsettling, shocking, or horrifying the truth, it sometimes seemed, the better.”⁸⁷ Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss, a 1997 memoir about her four-year-long sexual relationship with her own father, perhaps pushed the form the furthest.⁸⁸ A writer for Amazon.com, noting that Americans now lived in a world awash in “ordinary citizens selling their personal traumas,” nevertheless struggled to summon up a list of topics as shocking as the one Harrison had written about: “Mothers Who Sleep with Their Daughters’ Boyfriends; Men Who Wear Their Girlfriends’ Clothes; People Whose Families Have Been Murdered before Their Eyes.” Clearly the culture had reached the point where “no subject is too salacious or too shameful for public consumption.”⁸⁹ Responding to Harrison’s memoir, Entertainment Weekly asked, “Just because a writer can speak the unspeakable, does that mean that she should?” This same writer reflected on how jolting the book’s contents had been for reviewers, The Washington Post blasting The Kiss as “slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical,” and a critic for the Wall Street Journal resorting to a phrase of her grandmother’s, urging the author to “hush up.”⁹⁰

Harrison responded to readers’ and critics’ revulsion with some surprise: “I expected some people to be angry with me,” she wrote, “but I imagined their anger would be directed toward what I had done, not toward the choice to write about it.” Borrowing a metaphor from the gay liberation movement, she acknowledged the fact that “I’m held up as one of the writers who have changed the complexion of memoir as a form—that my example has helped open the collective closet” and that “a lot of skeletons have been dragged out into the light.” That act was welcomed by some readers but shunned by others. Of her harshest critics, Harrison later wrote, “I accepted their vehemence, because they mirrored my private responses to my history with my father. It frightened me and it made me angry. It disgusted me. It still does. It’s supposed to. It’s taboo.”⁹¹ But what Harrison’s and other memoirs suggested was that the age of taboos was over, that there was nothing one could not broach in print.

This overstates the case, of course. There were limits to disclosure, even in an age of relentless confession. Women’s persistent silence surrounding their own abortions, although a constitutionally protected right, was a case in point. Whether the decision to keep one’s abortion “private” was an exercise of privacy was, however, not so clear. As legal scholar Carol Sanger argues, that choice had more to do with secrecy, which was motivated not by the “right or preference to keep something to one’s self” but by “fear of the consequences of revelation.”⁹² Some topics, even in the 1990s, still carried enough stigma to keep them largely out of public conversation. And certainly, most Americans did not make it a practice to reveal their greatest shames to utter strangers. Yet it was still striking that what Victorians would have considered to be their deepest, darkest secrets were now the common currency not just of psychotherapy but also of politics and popular culture.

E. L. Godkin had sworn in response to the inquisitive census of 1890 that “no man, and especially no woman, likes to tell a stranger about a secret disease or disability.”⁹³ Memoirists a century later were proving him wrong in spades. Writers like Harrison told strangers about far more than disease or disability. They played brilliantly to a public eager to peel away the layers of a person and to enter into another’s inner life, perhaps especially if something scandalous was involved. And they benefited handsomely—in fame, dollars, book contracts, a place on the talk show circuit—from the bargain they made to dispense with some of their secrets. Detractors railed against the trend, art critic William Grimes protesting, “Is there not something to be said for the unexamined life?”⁹⁴ Invariably, they pegged it to the waning fortunes of privacy in American society. Blaming the recovery movement, a therapeutic culture, a “strong interest in victimhood,” and, most worrisome of all, a shrinking “concern for privacy,” commentators lamented that “what used to be private is becoming increasingly public.”⁹⁵ Pronounced the New York Times Magazine, “We live in a time when the very notion of privacy, of a zone beyond the reach of public probing, has become an alien concept.”⁹⁶ Many words were spilled in the attempt to understand why so many Americans were so freely baring their intimate lives. After all, these were typically not citizens who had been pressed to disclose their affairs by others—who had attracted the glare of the media, who were driven by political necessity, or who had been outed. Rather, they exposed themselves willingly and, critics suggested, indiscriminately.

Why was privacy, one of the most charismatic concepts of the postwar era, being disavowed with such abandon? In the debate over the tell-all memoir, few registered the ways that releasing personal details out into the stream of public culture could be a response to a sense of privacy already violated or diminished. Whether one was going to be known might be out of one’s hands. For some confessional writers, however, telling one’s story was perhaps the best means of controlling the way in which one would be known. Disclosure could be less about giving information away than about reining it back in—and publicness a path for reclaiming private life or at least one’s own version of it. Confessional memoirists thus discarded privacy as traditionally understood even as they sometimes embraced the airing of one’s life as its best protection. Was writing The Kiss a supremely exhibitionist act or the only way to banish private shame? It was not always possible to sort out whether a given memoir was an assertion of privacy or a rejection of it, a yearning to be surveilled or a flight from it. What does seem clear is that the confessional mode represented yet another episode in the story of how Americans have both fought to enlarge privacy and invade it—often at the very same time.

Correcting the Record, Controlling the Narrative

One of the most notable of the new crop of memoirs was, like William Styron’s, a work on mental illness. Written by Susanna Kaysen about her eighteen-month psychiatric confinement at McLean Hospital for borderline personality disorder when a teenager in the late 1960s, Girl, Interrupted (1993) was a runaway bestseller.⁹⁷ It was also acknowledged by many critics to have “helped spark the memoir craze.”⁹⁸ In its pages, using spare but eloquent prose, Kaysen offered an account of the daily rounds of mental illness. Of the young women on her ward, she observed, “In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity. All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.”⁹⁹ It was an apt description of the new memoir form too.

Compared regularly to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar—also set at McLean and trained on psychiatry and female adolescence—Girl, Interrupted was, however, a product of its own time. Plath had written under a pseudonym, careful to distance this difficult story from her public self. “The difference of three decades,” noted one critic, “is that Susanna Kaysen leads off her book with a facsimile of the first page of her own case record folder at McLean Hospital.”¹⁰⁰ Indeed, the very first things the reader learns about Kaysen are plucked directly from her confidential medical file: her name, her parents’ names and address, her date of birth, and her diagnosis of “borderline personality.” Rather than cloak such details, Kaysen fixed on them, interspersing her narrative with the administrative paperwork that recorded her experience of psychiatric confinement.¹⁰¹

In this respect, Girl, Interrupted bears some resemblance to The File: A Personal History (1997), another memoir of this era, by English journalist Timothy Garton Ash. Ash had conducted research in Berlin in the late 1970s and would later learn that he had been closely scrutinized by the East German secret police during his time there. The memoir was his attempt to reconstruct this two-decades-old history in dialogue with the Stasi’s newly opened files. Ash compared the “subjective, allusive, emotional, self-description” of his own diary entries from that period with the “cold outward eye” of the Stasi’s observation reports.¹⁰² If less overtly, Kaysen’s was also an account of studying others’ surveillance of herself—nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and orderlies—and placing their interpretations alongside her own to unsettle the reader’s sense of whom to trust. Did the doctor who committed her to McLean while knowing so little about her do so after only twenty minutes (her recollection) or three hours (his documented account)? Should one rely on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s characterization of “Borderline Personality Disorder,” on which Kaysen spends a chapter, or the less technical and more engaging chapter that follows it, called “My Diagnosis,” for one’s understanding of the author?¹⁰³

As such, Kaysen posed in stark terms the question of the known citizen and its consequences. Just how well did the doctor, the hospital staff, and the broader society that committed Kaysen to a psychiatric hospital know her? On what grounds, indeed, was authoritative knowledge of a person built? And what kind of power and responsibility came with the knowing? Kaysen’s response was to offer a more intimate version of her history. Coming on the heels of the period in which Americans first contended with the “record prison,” the shape of her memoir is noteworthy. Although it goes unmentioned in Girl, Interrupted, the author’s father was the economist Carl Kaysen, who had headed the federal task force on the storage of government statistics during the National Data Center controversy of the mid-1960s. The Kaysen Report addressed public concerns about the warehousing of citizens’ data, ultimately backing the proposal.¹⁰⁴ In 1993, Susanna Kaysen resurrected her own warehoused data in order to tell a story that was a quarter-century old. She did so, at least in part, to challenge the file.

8.1.   Emblematic of the new frankness of memoirs in the 1990s, Susanna Kaysen reprinted documents related to her psychiatric confinement at McLean Hospital.

Girl, Interrupted is littered with reproductions of documents from Kaysen’s medical dossier. Her case record folder, admission form, medication and treatment chart, nurses’ reports, progress notes, and discharge form—not to mention interoffice memoranda about her and letters from her doctor offering assessments that she is ready to rejoin the outside world—tell their own spare story. Their inclusion invites questions about others’ categorizations and about the ways Kaysen herself was classified and filed: she titles one of her chapters “Stigmatography.” Kaysen’s closing words are a meditation on a Vermeer painting that haunts her, titled “Girl Interrupted at Her Music.” She writes, “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”¹⁰⁵ Implying that she had been “fixed”—not by an artist, but by the judgments in her medical file—and never fully seen, Kaysen in her memoir refocused the reader on the life beneath the paperwork.¹⁰⁶ Disclosing the details of her institutionalization could be read less as a casting off of privacy than a reclaiming of those “snatched” months.

Indeed, Kaysen vigilantly sought to preserve her privacy after her memoir came out. As Time magazine reported, the fact that the memoirist wrote so openly about her struggles with mental illness made her a “cult figure,” bringing her many letters, fans, and invitations to take part in public debates about, for example, antidepressants like Prozac.¹⁰⁷ It was not, Kaysen claimed, a welcome publicity. Rather, many readers, drawn in by the transparency of the author’s prose, assumed a familiarity that made her uneasy. Kaysen objected to such overtures, saying, “I don’t believe I have any obligation to let people into my private life.” Time probed the seeming paradox: “as Kaysen becomes famous for writing a confessional book, it is her reticence that is most striking.”¹⁰⁸

In an interview years later, in response to a second memoir concerned largely with her sex life, Kaysen again attempted to draw a line between herself and the person who appeared in the pages of her books. That distinction confounded readers and critics alike. Kaysen wanted to have it both ways, they implied. The interviewer, insistent, asked, “Why did you withhold information about your family in Girl, Interrupted and why are you now unwilling to answer the natural follow-up questions about your current sexual functioning?” Kaysen replied, “People assume that if you’re willing to say something about personal matters, you must say everything. You’re a bad sport if you don’t participate in total self-revelation.” Although she included documents from a confidential file in her first memoir in part to signal her account’s transparent truth, and although she divulged highly personal details, psychological as well as physical, with an arresting directness in the second, Kaysen rebuffed those who believed they were entitled to know her. These firsthand accounts were just as crafted and artificial as a novel, Kaysen asserted, not “a CAT scan of my emotional life.”¹⁰⁹ Full disclosure had never been her interest or her point.

As many memoirists were coming to discover, however, their fans often demanded a more intimate relationship. Noting that “many readers feel they know me after they read one of my books,” author Cheryl Strayed explained her need to set boundaries with audiences who took for granted that her “entire life is up for discussion.”¹¹⁰ People seemed to believe that “a memoirist has simply opened a vein and bled on the page,” writer Ayelet Waldman protested. “The reader thinks they know all of you … but you don’t owe your reader everything, every story of your life, every element of you. You owe your reader only what you want to reveal.”¹¹¹ Critics of the memoir boom notwithstanding, these writers spoke to readers’ desire for more particulars, not fewer. And, whether sincere or savvy about their reasons for withholding personal details from their fans, these authors also indicated that there were limits to what even a confessional writer would reveal. For her part, frustrated by her fans’ persistence in wanting an unmediated view and personal access, Kaysen would later claim to have given up on the memoir as a genre.¹¹² Each of these public protestations about privacy from memoirists came on the heels of highly revealing accounts of their personal lives. The pattern underscored privacy’s ambiguous allure—do we want it or don’t we?—and perhaps even its commercial value. Would readers, one wonders, have been as interested in memoirists if they had truly revealed all, leaving nothing to the imagination, or to fill the pages of the next book?

Kaysen’s second memoir would test the boundaries of public discourse. It would also probe the limits of privacy law. Was there any protection for the lives a memoirist dragged into the spotlight along with her own? This was one of the thorny issues raised by Kaysen’s 2001 book, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, which was centrally concerned with ongoing, seemingly incurable vaginal pain and its effects on her sexual and emotional life. Critics classed it as “autopathography,” a term coined to describe the raft of new autobiographical work homing in on individual illness, both physical and mental.¹¹³ Like Kaysen’s first memoir, the book stood out for its brutal honesty and transgressive subject matter. Less favorably reviewed, however—Publishers’ Weekly billed it a “thin, disappointing chronicle of what happened when ‘something went wrong’ with her vagina”—some dismissed it, in a telling phrase of the period, as “TMI”: too much information.¹¹⁴ BookPage, for example, noted that Kaysen was “being criticized for taking autobiography to a new level of exposure with her personal confessions.”¹¹⁵

It was the nature rather than the amount of that information that would trigger a legal challenge against Kaysen by her then-boyfriend. At the core of the lawsuit was the author’s characterization of him as aggressively sexual, unsympathetic to her pain, and, in one episode that she recounted, physically coercive. The dramatic arc of the memoir would come in her soul searching as to whether his actions constituted sexual violence. Although the boyfriend was unnamed in the text and some identifying details had been changed (his occupation, his home town), it would have been obvious to any of their acquaintances—he charged—precisely to whom she referred. Under one of the torts that had grown out of Brandeis and Warren’s call for a right to privacy, he sued for the “public disclosure of private facts.”

Memoirs of this era were regularly portrayed as navel-gazing or unseemly. Kaysen’s, however, led to questions about the impact of intimate revelations on others within the memoirist’s circle—and, more distantly, about the consequences of true confessions in the public sphere. To what kind of privacy was a character in the life of a writer entitled? And what had happened to the right to protect one’s reputation, one’s “inviolate personality”? In Bonome v. Kaysen of 2004, the Massachusetts court agreed that the boyfriend (now publicly identified, as he had not been in the book, as Joseph Bonome) had a right to privacy and even a right to control the dissemination of private information about himself. Yet the court acknowledged that “it is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate one’s intimate and personal experiences from the people with whom those experiences are shared.”¹¹⁶ The court went on to emphasize the public’s legitimate interest in Kaysen’s memoir, particularly its examination of how “a person’s physical difficulties would affect her relationship with her boyfriend, including highly intimate aspects of it.”¹¹⁷ Most importantly, however, Kaysen’s right to “publicity” and “to disclose her own intimate affairs” was protected by the First Amendment. The court concluded that “Kaysen’s own personal story—insofar as it relates to matters of legitimate public concern—is hers to contribute to public discourse.”¹¹⁸ As one legal analyst described it, any other ruling would unfairly restrict an individual’s “ability to describe his or her own life.”¹¹⁹

In 2004, the law, like the media and the culture at large, seemed to line up on the side of self-publicity rather than privacy.¹²⁰ It was an illuminating commentary on the dramatic changes in public discourse since Warren and Brandeis’s time. As legal scholars have demonstrated, the “right to privacy” that the Boston lawyers envisioned in 1890 was treated increasingly in the twentieth century by courts as a frail claim against First Amendment rights. The privacy torts their essay triggered largely failed to shelter individuals from unwanted publicity, amounting to “a jurisprudential dead end.”¹²¹ The evolution of free speech jurisprudence, shifting notions of decency, and increasing deference to the press as to what counted as “newsworthy” had all made claims of emotional damage of the sort Warren and Brandeis laid out very difficult to sustain.¹²² As the most recent edition of the Handbook of the Law of Torts summarizes, “The law is not for the protection of the hypersensitive, and all of us must, to some extent, lead lives exposed to the public gaze.”¹²³

Exemplifying the strong U.S. tilt toward freedom of speech (including commercial speech), press, and expression as compared to Europe, Bonome v. Kaysen revealed “a road not taken in American privacy law—that of a right to personality.”¹²⁴ It pointed to the failure of Warren and Brandeis’s concept of an “inviolate personality” to gain any real traction in U.S. society and law.¹²⁵ Or perhaps it revealed a legal as well as cultural preference for the confessing rather than the reticent personality. For some, the prioritizing of individual self-expression over the texture of public discourse was the wrong turn that privacy law had taken as far back as the late nineteenth century, its effects on American life painfully apparent in the no-holds-barred quality of public talk at end of the twentieth.¹²⁶ At the very least it implied that the conflict between the freedom of speech and the right to one’s “personality”—the right to express oneself and the right to be known in a particular way—had no easy resolution.

The issues in the Kaysen-Bonome dispute were unusual in being adjudicated by courts. Similar standoffs had been fought in the pages of literary magazines, newspapers, and the court of public opinion, leading to a searching debate in the 1990s over the consequences of unrestrained self-expression. Biographers, autobiographers, and even historians would be implicated in controversies over improper disclosure.¹²⁷ These were pitched struggles for “control over the story of a life” by subjects, authors, and estates, each with their own position on which contents of a life ought to be shared and which sealed.¹²⁸ Although the privacy of famous figures, living and dead—and how specific revelations would affect their reputation—was often the primary consideration, broader cultural sensibilities about the boundaries of propriety entered the discussion too.

One of these disputes surfaced right at the beginning of the decade. Fittingly, it concerned the “confessional” poet Anne Sexton, known for writing about matters “many people thought should be kept entirely private” in the early 1960s, including mental illness, abortion, and addiction.¹²⁹ Her life was the material for Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Biography, published in 1991.¹³⁰ There was in this case no unwilling subject, no “unconfessional confessionalist,” as Susanna Kaysen had been tagged for her stubborn refusal to elaborate on what appeared between the covers of her memoirs. Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974, had left exhaustive files and clear permission for a biographer to use them. Her daughter Linda, executor of her will, was happy to hand over those materials to Middlebrook, whom she had selected as her mother’s biographer. But the volume stirred up a storm nonetheless for making use of more than 300 hours of tape-recorded psychotherapy sessions between Sexton and her psychiatrists. The controversy rested on the special status of medical records, even those of the dead. These sorts of documents were holdouts in a tell-all age. Linda Sexton had, however, consented to their use, declaring, “My mother had no sense of privacy, and I don’t believe it’s my place to construct one on her behalf.” The Sexton estate had moreover agreed to the arrangement and even planned for the tapes’ deposit in a research archive. Even so, the American Psychiatric Association filed a formal ethics complaint against the psychiatrist who had consented to publication. Only several years after the biography was issued would he be exonerated.¹³¹ All along the way, Middlebrook and Linda Sexton affirmed that the poet herself had intended that the psychotherapy sessions be part of her life’s record.

Whose life was it anyway? Critic Janet Malcolm dissected the dilemma of who owned an individual’s story in her 1994 book The Silent Woman, a meditation on the ways multiple biographers had impinged on the lives of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Sexton’s contemporaries and the subjects of a later biography by Middlebrook).¹³² Hughes, who kept his own counsel about his famous, estranged wife after her suicide at age 30, had been lacerated by various Plath chroniclers in what Malcolm called “punishment by biography.” In a voluble world, Hughes’s reticence, as he well understood, was itself suspect. Thus, Malcolm wrote, it was “Hughes’s bitter fate to be perpetually struggling with Plath over the ownership of his life, trying to wrest it back from her.”¹³³

Casting the biographer as a “professional burglar,” Malcolm set out to expose the voyeurism at the genre’s core, which she likened to reading someone else’s mail. But she also made clear that such prurient curiosity was abetted by the machinery of a knowing society. Hughes had at one point, in frustration, written, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.” Malcolm strongly, if regretfully, dissented. “Of course,” she wrote, “as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not ‘own’ the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.” In her view, “The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time” were just an instance of “society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness.” Indeed, claimed Malcolm, “Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.”¹³⁴

Malcolm furthered her point by recounting the tale of Sylvia Plath’s first biographer, who published an account of the poet’s life in 1976 without the benefit of any access to her family and friends, archival materials, or published letters and journals.¹³⁵ How could this be? “Facts as such are relatively easy to come by in a society whose growing complexity has spawned a growing network of official institutions,” Malcolm explained. Schools, libraries, newspapers, government offices—all “were there for the plundering, as every credit house and FBI investigator well knows.” This made it relatively easy for the would-be biographer to “construct a reasonable collage from the bits and pieces resurrected from these bureaucratic mausoleums.” Malcolm went on to observe that this first biography of the poet bore a “striking resemblance” to the many later ones, despite their reliance on a more intimate trove of materials, including Plath’s own published letters and journals. “The traces we leave of ourselves are evidently so deep that every investigator will stumble upon them,” she mused. “If the door to one room of secrets is closed, others are open and beckoning.”¹³⁶ The record prison, it turned out, was a goldmine for the diligent biographer. As Susanna Kaysen had discovered too in dredging up her adolescent medical file, a documented life was easy to find.

The biographer’s ability to ferret out facts even about subjects who defied being known was most impressive in the case of novelist J. D. Salinger, the famous—and famously reclusive—author of The Catcher in the Rye (1956). Plagued by fans, photographers, the press, and those who wished to tell his life story, Salinger attempted to deter them all by retreating to his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and steadfastly refusing public engagement. Salinger, who was said to have “elevated privacy to an art form,” would nevertheless be the subject of four separate book-length exposés in the late 1980s and 1990s, with two more following shortly after his death in 2010.¹³⁷ His resistance to confession was in fact part of what made him so captivating to biographers and the reading public both.

One of the more persistent intruders was British writer Ian Hamilton, who embarked on a biography of Salinger in the 1980s. The angle Hamilton took, however, was a postmodern one: the challenge of a quarry who didn’t want to be caught, a subject who resisted the biographer’s entreaties. As such, Hamilton aimed to make himself rather than Salinger the central character in the book. But the premise did not pan out. Janet Malcolm recounts, “As Hamilton pursued his researches into Salinger’s childhood and youth, his own role as comically thwarted biographer was pulled out from under him.” Indeed, “far from being thwarted, he was amassing a great deal of information about his subject.” Salinger, though he had been in seclusion for more than twenty-five years, “had lived in the world until the mid-sixties, and had left the usual traces.”¹³⁸ These included many private letters that had wound up in archives. Eventually the biographer and his subject would come to a head over these documents in a court of law. Salinger sued for the rights to his unpublished correspondence and won, barring Hamilton from using the letters.¹³⁹ The biographer’s ill-starred project delayed, he would finally publish a much diluted and quite different version of his book in 1988.¹⁴⁰

Salinger was the victor in that particular case, although ironies abounded: he had to publicly testify and also file his private letters at the Library of Congress.¹⁴¹ But knottier issues surfaced when his intimates—an ex-lover and his own daughter—sought to write about him as part of their own life stories. Joyce Maynard, a woman who had been romantically involved with the much-older Salinger when she was a teenager, and Margaret (Peggy) Salinger, now a middle-aged woman with a family of her own, wrote not as biographers, but as memoirists. For both writers, the author’s privacy was a cloak for ugly secrets, whether Salinger’s exploitative relationships with young women or his emotional abandonment of his family. Each described a need to tell her own story, in which Salinger just happened to play a pivotal role. These were “autobiographies of women whose lives were damaged by him,” writes a literary scholar, and which “narrate the harm that Salinger’s obsession with privacy caused for the women who participated in his private life.”¹⁴² Maynard, for example, recounted an episode in which Salinger turned on her for purportedly allowing his phone number to fall into the hands of a Time magazine reporter, telling her that the book she was writing “could be the end of us.”¹⁴³ Peggy Salinger related that before taking an overdose of pills as an adult, which she knew would send her to the emergency room, she verified that the hospital would not be able to identify her as Salinger’s daughter.¹⁴⁴ Both memoirists made the point that striving to keep something private could be as harmful as disclosing something secret.

In terms of content, these memoirs were hardly unusual fare in the 1990s. But their authors faced severe criticism for raiding Salinger’s carefully curated solitude.¹⁴⁵ Maynard’s At Home in the World (1998) came in for special rebuke, especially in connection with the author’s decision to sell Salinger’s letters.¹⁴⁶ As a writer for the New York Times Magazine summarized, “For years, Maynard refused to discuss this affair. In doing so now, she is violating the privacy of a figure who is revered in a very personal way by a great many people, both for his writing and for his decision to retreat into the silence that Maynard is breaking. She will be—indeed she already has been—called shameless and mercenary. Maynard knows this, of course.”¹⁴⁷ Indeed, “knowing this” was part of her shame. Her lack of consideration for J. D. Salinger’s reputation, but also for her own in violating his, was a key feature of the criticism that rained down in the wake of her memoir. Maynard was a well-known figure even before the Salinger controversy, a standard-bearer for what some saw as excessively self-regarding and intimate essays. The same New York Times Magazine article displayed this animus, taking the writer to task by introducing readers to her fans—those Maynard referred to as her “website community”—who, it was reported, followed her every move on her highly personal web log, one calling Maynard “the literary equivalent of ‘The Truman Show’ or Princess Diana.”¹⁴⁸ Such details, a kind of 1990s shorthand for overexposure, cemented the case of the memoirist as exhibitionist.¹⁴⁹

The controversy over Salinger’s “outing” laid bare what had been barely hidden to begin with: the gendered nature of the memoir boom. Many of the path-breaking contributions to the genre had been authored by men, including Frank McCourt, who wrote about his impoverished childhood in Ireland in Angela’s Ashes (1986); Tobias Wolff, who recounted his life with a hostile stepfather in This Boy’s Life (1989); and Dave Peltzer, who narrated a harrowing story of childhood physical and emotional abuse in A Child Called “It” (1995).¹⁵⁰ Despite acclaim for these works, the highly personal nature, domestic settings, and emotion-laden thrust of most of the era’s memoirs ensured that the genre was readily feminized.

Women confessors—memoirists like Pat Loud, Susanna Kaysen, and Joyce Maynard, but also public disclosers of others’ sins in the 1990s, like Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky—were often the vessels for the new explicitness about matters sexual and traumatic in public life.¹⁵¹ They were also routinely blamed for debasing both the private and public sphere and scorned for their lavish regard for their own small lives. For Joyce Maynard and Peggy Salinger, the implicit, and sometimes explicit, comparison was to the larger-than-life man they dishonored. While for instance Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called Hamilton’s biography of J. D. Salinger “decidedly unauthorized,” he branded Maynard’s and Peggy Salinger’s memoirs “self-serving.”¹⁵² The latter was “an unattractive and unwelcome book … almost indescribably self-indulgent, and it invades the author’s father’s cherished privacy to the point of disloyalty and exploitation.” It was, he summarized, “a blow beneath the belt.”¹⁵³ Maynard came in for even more stinging reviews.¹⁵⁴ Yardley wrote of her memoir that “you may … find yourself struggling to comprehend self-infatuation so vast and reckless that the victim cannot imagine a detail of her life so minute or trivial as to be of no interest to everyone else on this planet.” A former Yale classmate of Maynard’s wrote that she suffered from “a delusion torn from the Oliver Sacks casebook: The Woman Who Mistook Herself for Someone Interesting.”¹⁵⁵

Against this account of the disrobing of a “private man” in the service of self-promotion, however, was another story concerning feminism’s transformation of the meaning of the private and, along with it, the power of intimate revelation. Peggy Salinger described her “sacrilegious” decision to break the silence about her father and “generations of moldy secrets, both real and imagined,” as akin to allowing “some light and fresh air” into her life.¹⁵⁶ “I have come to believe that my greatest protection comes in self-disclosure,” was how Joyce Maynard defended her own decision, characterizing it as a holding-to-account of a powerful man, as well as an act of self-liberation. As she put it, “It’s shame, not exposure, that I can’t endure.”¹⁵⁷ Another woman in Salinger’s life, Jean Miller, applauded Maynard’s work: “She was very courageous in breaking the code that we all had, not verbally but emotionally, signed onto: don’t talk.”¹⁵⁸

In tune with other memoirists, especially those who sought to publicize exploitation—whether by parents, partners, or priests—Maynard defended “a woman’s right to her own story” because, she said, “the most powerful tool most of us possess is our own voice.”¹⁵⁹ Maynard, moreover, understood the attacks and trivialization she faced in doing so as a matter of gender politics. “One day I hope some feminist scholar will examine the way in which a woman’s recounting of her history is so often ridiculed as self-absorbed and fundamentally unimportant,” she charged. “One need not look far for examples of male writers who have written freely and with no small measure of self-absorption about the territory of personal experience, who are praised for their courage and searing honesty.”¹⁶⁰ Maynard herself countered her detractors with “letter after letter” from readers who found solace in her story, given their own experiences of family alcoholism, exploitative relationships, and unrealistic standards. Among those letters, she noted, in a gesture to sisterhood, were those “I received from two other women who had also engaged in correspondences with J. D. Salinger eerily like my own.” Maynard’s reflections turned the tables on those who viewed privacy as “sacred” and her own spilling of secrets as “a profound betrayal of trust.” Although “the pursuit of privacy has been portrayed by many as evidence of purity of character,” she contended, it was just as often a shield for behavior that was much more fundamentally “inappropriate and invasive” than was her own.¹⁶¹ Privacy, so often figured as a social good, was here billed as a conspirator against the weak and vulnerable. Confession might offer a surer path to possession of one’s story or one’s life.

It was no accident that famous men who shunned publicity became culture heroes in these same years—Salinger, of course, but also the novelists Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Unlike the Pat Louds and Joyce Maynards who seemed to thrive on the attention that came from public fixation on their stories, these men did not spill their secrets and seemingly required no such confirmation from an audience. In a tell-all culture, many admired them for bucking the trend. DeLillo in fact made this a running theme of his work. His Great Jones Street, as early as 1973, revolved around a rock star “who tries to step out of his legend”; the hero, one scholar notes, earns the admiration of “a cultish group” for whom privacy becomes “a revolutionary wish.”¹⁶² Inspired by a photograph of J. D. Salinger that appeared in the New York Post in 1988, DeLillo placed a reclusive writer at the center of his novel Mao II (1991).¹⁶³ As the novelist grasped, obsessive interest attaching to the recluse made those who opted out of publicity the most fascinating of public figures. Jonathan Yardley remarked in the Washington Post in 2004 that he had “largely forgotten” about Catcher in the Rye (which he judged overrated) since its publication a half-century earlier. But he could not say the same for Salinger, “whose celebrated reclusiveness has had the effect of keeping him in the public eye.”¹⁶⁴

Yardley contrasted Salinger’s thin publishing output with the outpouring of writing about him. “Whether calculated or not,” mused Yardley, “his reclusiveness has created an aura that heightens, rather than diminishes, the mystique” of his literary production.¹⁶⁵ As the question of calculation here suggests, even Salinger, the most private of writers, was shaped fundamentally by a culture of disclosure. This was not simply because others relentlessly sought to expose him, although that they certainly did. The most recent Salinger biography to date—a compilation of ephemera, photographs, and remembrances about the author—pledges that it finally answers the mysteries of the man’s life: why he stopped publishing, why he disappeared, and what he wrote during those reclusive years. It also promises, via nine years of research on five continents and more than 200 interviews by which the authors “disclose, track, and connect” the pieces of Salinger’s life, to “place the reader on increasingly intimate terms with an author who had been adamantly inaccessible for more than half a century.”¹⁶⁶ One conclusion of all this digging echoes a uniquely damning revelation in Maynard’s memoir: that Salinger obsessively followed his own press. “Far from being a recluse,” these chroniclers observe, Salinger “was constantly in conversation with the world in order to reinforce its notion of his reclusion.”¹⁶⁷ The author “ferociously monitored every blip on the radar screen and cared hugely about his reputation,” refusing to speak to reporters only until “the press had forgotten about him for too long.” What appeared important to Salinger, in an environment in which it was impossible truly to withdraw from the world—a truth his biographers inadvertently demonstrate—was that “he controlled the communication, the narrative.”¹⁶⁸ Despite the apparent gulf between them, Salinger and his former lover Maynard may have shared this particular definition of privacy.

Controlling the narrative may have been the most that citizens could hope for by the end of the twentieth century, given that their lives were co-owned by so many others. Much as the Louds had aspired to be their own producers, memoirists seized the opportunity to shape and edit their lives for a broader audience. As a media scholar put it, “Representation in the mediated ‘reality’ of our mass culture is in itself power.”¹⁶⁹ Sociologist Joshua Gamson has made a similar case for the rise of “trash” talk shows in the 1990s and their particular appeal for those of nonconforming sexualities: “While you might get a few minutes on national news every once in a while, or a spot on a sitcom looking normal as can be, almost everywhere else … you are either unwelcome, written by somebody else, or heavily edited.” On the other hand, “on television talk shows, you are more than welcome. You are begged and coached and asked to tell, tell, tell.” Gamson sees what are, in one light, exploitative spectacles as subversive vehicles for “moving private stuff into a public spotlight, arousing all sorts of questions about what the public sphere can, does, and should look like.”¹⁷⁰ The airing of intimate matters, in this view, might nurture a more hospitable public culture for privacy, understood as personal self-determination.

Easily caricatured and dismissed, the confessional memoir of the 1990s—still alive and well today—was not simply an exercise in narcissism nor an evacuation of privacy.¹⁷¹ Some memoirists wrote to puncture others’ secrets or to unburden their own, carrying on the legacy of feminism and other social movements that had transformed the rules of public discourse beginning in the late 1960s. Others sought to take the reins of their own narrative. Pat Loud and Susanna Kaysen each wrote not only in order to add to but also to counter the information about them already out there in the world, whether in the form of a television camera or the quieter but still weighty judgment of a medical file. In their memoirs, we recognize a desire to be truly seen. We can also glimpse the effects of the multiple forms of surveillance that had taken root in American culture by the time they wrote, continuous media coverage as well as the running bureaucratic record. That those who attracted the most condemnation for their revelations were women spoke to the fact that, by the 1980s and 1990s, it was no longer just “public men” who were engaged in tending their public reputations or personas. Citizens of all stripes had a vested interest in the ways they broadcast their lives to the larger society, as well as new tools to put to the task. Battles over the memoir, pitting private citizens against one another, gave vivid testament to the fragmenting of an official consensus about privacy in the latter half of the twentieth century, an era in which the boundaries of propriety had been exposed as having a politics all their own.¹⁷²

At the century’s end, the combination of new vehicles for telling all, the imperatives of authenticity, and every individual’s steadily accumulating record meant that achieving some semblance of privacy—or control over one’s narrative—could entail talking rather than hiding, divulging rather than seeking solitude. That doing so could place one in a community of disclosing others meant that the confessional turn was never as solipsistic as critics imagined, just as a mania for privacy could prove narcissistic and public facing.¹⁷³ What the talk shows, the memoir boom, and a thoroughly personalized public sphere indicated was that the old terms for thinking about privacy, laid down in the nineteenth century, were being sloughed off for new ones.

Publicists of Their Own Lives

The memoir boom showed no sign of retreat in the twenty-first century.¹⁷⁴ Between 2004 and 2008 alone, sales of those books categorized as Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent.¹⁷⁵ Memoir, a critic argues, had become “not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged.”¹⁷⁶ The proliferation of memoir-writing guides and websites (such as one “dedicated to delivering the message that Everyone has a story to tell and telling those stories!”) and the spate of false or faked memoirs in recent years are indicative of the memoir’s pride of place in American popular culture.¹⁷⁷ Those who write and teach about memoirs are often rueful regarding the genre’s status: one dedicates her book to “those who read memoirs and those who write memoirs,” as well as “those who wish we wouldn’t.”¹⁷⁸ But they do not doubt its relevance or staying power. As one of them puts it, “Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times.”¹⁷⁹

Debate over the implications of the tell-all mode continues apace. Looking askance at the phenomenon in 2010, one writer believed that it fed off a “dramatic confusion … between private and public life.”¹⁸⁰ Defenders of the genre instead described writing about oneself as the most authentic sort of examination available to contemporary citizens. David Shields, an essayist—and a biographer of J. D. Salinger—had started out as a fiction writer. But he found himself increasingly “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by himself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters.” Compared to exploring one’s own life, “everything else seems like so much gimmickry.”¹⁸¹ He hoped these narratives “(autobiography, confession, memoir, embarrassment, whatever) can perhaps produce something that is … ‘truer,’ more ‘real.’ ”¹⁸² A teacher of memoir criticizes the critics who treat memoir writing as “nothing more than a New Age Excrescence, a latest fad, the apotheosis of a self-as-victim movement sponsored in equal parts by therapists, confession gurus, and scandalmongers eager to cash in on the bottomless societal appetite for self-exposing disclosure.”¹⁸³ He argues instead that at its best the memoir responds to the Socratic injunction to “Know thyself.” Faithful self-knowledge is its true product, a “necessary wisdom” that cannot be found in any other way. The pressure on individuals to make sense of personal experience “is as intense as it has ever been,” he writes, and the need for exemplars that light the way “if anything, growing.”¹⁸⁴

This argument over what truly motivated contemporary confessions—was it self-discovery or was it self-exploitation?—raged on even as disclosures on the page were joined by those online.¹⁸⁵ Structural changes in the very nature of communications at the turn of the twenty-first century, heralded by the arrival of “Web 2.0,” both tapped into the confessional impulse and renewed debate about it. The social media platforms of the early 2000s were perhaps as significant as the telegraph cables and phone lines of Warren and Brandeis’s day. And they resulted from a similar partnership of technology and commerce. Affinities between the new memoirists and the “new media” would be immediately apparent. Social networking, video sharing, blogging, and microblogging (that is, status updates and tweets) did not simply permit their users to “create and share their own content.”¹⁸⁶ They practically incited them to do so, calling on users to offer a steady stream of opinions, stories, reviews, likes, and dislikes, preferably eliciting others’ interest in the process. To be “invisible” on social media—meaning “to post content without others noting it in some way”—was to have fundamentally botched the project.¹⁸⁷

As technology scholar danah boyd makes clear, what was novel about this networked mode was precisely its encouragement to share and spread information. Personal communications, as a consequence, were more visible and accessible than ever before. Wiretapping and “listening in” had been products of a society that presumed most exchanges of information to be privileged or at least hard to get at. In stunning fashion, new media platforms inverted this “private-by-default, public-through-effort formula.” This was evident in social media companies’ public ethos of “sharing,” underwritten by their interest in the profits to be made from consumers’ data. It was also part of their hidden architecture, which ensured that privacy settings were difficult to manipulate.¹⁸⁸ The new code—technical and cultural both—supported publicity rather than privacy.

If new confessionals upended traditional autobiography and even traditional memoir writing, the web log (or blog) reinvented and recharged the diary for the Internet age. New formats for circulating one’s story proliferated, spurred on by the ease of projecting one’s life into cyberspace and the lure of winning untold readers and fans. Whatever one’s stance on this “global autobiography project,” there was no gainsaying its appeal.¹⁸⁹ By 2006 there were 27.2 million web logs in existence, with the number of new blogs doubling every five months or 75,000 new blogs being created a day.¹⁹⁰ Five years later, a Nielsen survey put the number of blogs around the world at 181 million, with three of the ten largest social networking sites—Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr—housed in the United States.¹⁹¹ This “unprecedented movement of modern autobiographical speakers” was explained as the confluence of digital diarists’ “relaxed view of personal privacy, the desire to share their stories publicly, and the technological access to reach a widespread audience.”¹⁹² Others characterized the trend less charitably: “Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online.”¹⁹³

The pivot to “kids today” was not incidental to the discussion. While the memoir was often the province of the middle-aged or older—a medium for those who had lived enough of a life to reflect on at length—web-based formats were initially the territory of the young. Fear and fascination about new modes of self-broadcasting centered on adolescents who appeared to have no understanding of, or placed no value on, personal privacy. A New Yorker cartoon from 2010 pictured a mother sitting in her attic thumbing through an old diary; her daughter asks: “What was the point of writing a blog that nobody else could read?”¹⁹⁴

Some saw teens as harbingers of networked sociability, their inner selves firmly beamed outward toward a host of friends and followers. Others portrayed them as the society’s true realists, the “only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion” in a world of not just known but surveilled citizens.¹⁹⁵ The most popular refrain by far, however, was that the young pioneers of social media were on a mission to do away with personal privacy. This was true even as scholars dismantled the assumption that teenagers were any more interested in baring themselves to the world than was anyone else.¹⁹⁶ In this analysis, social media was simply the latest stage for struggles over “private space and personal expression” that adolescents had waged before in their diaries and suburban bedrooms.¹⁹⁷ Indeed, it was yet another site where teenagers sought to evade the most irritating privacy intruders of all: their parents, who often insisted on monitoring teens’ social media use. Privacy, concluded one study, was something that youth “are actively and continuously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so.”¹⁹⁸

The publicness of social media presented opportunities for young and old alike: the ability to keep track of a wide range of acquaintances, and its converse, a much-expanded potential audience for one’s own daily life. It for the same reasons introduced new privacy problems. As two scholars of surveillance would summarize the state of things, particularly in light of the rise of powerful data aggregators, “If you figure that your life is so disorganized, private, and fragmented that no biographer would or could keep track of it, think again.”¹⁹⁹ Managing what about oneself should and should not be made available to others suddenly became fraught with complexity. Social media users in response devised creative strategies to control the flow of their data. One of the most interesting of these, as documented in an ethnography of teenagers conducted by danah boyd, was sharing information in order to maintain one’s privacy. “In a world in which posting updates is common, purposeful, and performative,” she writes, “sharing often allows teens to control a social situation more than simply opting out. It also guarantees that others can’t define the social situation.” By emphasizing, excluding, or rewriting aspects of their personal lives on platforms premised on “unlimited sharing,” boyd contends, these users have both sought out and been able to achieve meaningful privacy online—even and perhaps especially when they appeared to be telling all.²⁰⁰ Teens thus navigated the unfamiliar technological platforms on which social life now played out with the tools at their disposal. Much like confessional memoirists, they deliberately projected narratives about themselves that might shelter private life or at least their preferred telling of it. They spilled secrets, but they also worked to shape their stories.

8.2.   Blogs and other social media provoked much consternation about changing privacy norms in the early twenty-first century.

Social media users’ ability to regulate how and to whom they are known, however, was hardly as simple as that. The same technology that facilitated connection and sociability carried unprecedented possibilities for surveillance, as well as the prospect of forced visibility. Norms around privacy were, as always, a complex amalgam of individual choices and societal coercion. The ability of giant technology corporations to set the terms for online “sharing” was a case in point. The deliberate weakening of Facebook’s privacy policies from 2005 to 2009, argue two scholars, “betrays that this medium isn’t simply adapting to new conceptions of privacy as embodied by younger people—it is actively shaping those conceptions and slowly pushing users toward acceptance of further exposure and less control.”²⁰¹ The notion that users of these platforms in any real sense consented to trade away some of their privacy for access has been called a fiction (or worse). As the same scholars pointedly ask, “To what extent are we truly willing participants when a nearly universal architecture of communication … dominates our social world and becomes necessary for keeping a job, attending school, or having a life? Can you really opt out? Can you really even imagine opting out?”²⁰² A journalist likewise observes, “In a culture where people judge each other as much by their digital footprints as by their real-life personalities, it’s an act of faith to opt out of sharing your data.”²⁰³

Yet the fact that so many opted in was the easier target and more potent fascination for commentators. This included one cybercritic who dismissed blogging as confessional culture’s end of the line, where “narcissism and voyeurism join together in a closed circuit and the lines between inner and outer life dissolve entirely.”²⁰⁴ Blogs were not the half of it. Reality television, webcams, and smartphones were each roundly criticized for violating the categories of inner and outer, public and private, watcher and watched.²⁰⁵ That sense of transgression had defined the memoir boom too. By the turn of the twenty-first century its technologies of talk had escaped its generic confines to become the very texture of modern public life, animating what one critic described as “the inexhaustible eagerness of people to tell their life stories.”²⁰⁶

Once again, An American Family pointed the way. The series was regularly returned to as ground zero, seeming to foreshadow the nonstop exhibitionism of reality TV and a larger culture of self-display.²⁰⁷ One twenty-first-century critic described the voluntary self-exposure of the Louds in 1973 as “quaint” measured against later developments (he noted programs like Fear Factor that competed for ratings by heaping abuse on participants) that would make it “grotesquely obvious that many Americans will do anything to be on television.”²⁰⁸ The PBS documentary was also the acknowledged template for The Real World, a trail-blazing program that gathered a set of young adults, strangers to one another, in a residence in a new city and then let the cameras roll. It would, however, dispense with the sort of negotiations that had enabled the Louds some control over what would stay off the camera. The show debuted on MTV in 1992 and went on to become the longest-running reality program on television; at this writing it is in its thirty-third season.²⁰⁹

No longer were commentators surprised, as they had been in 1973, by Americans’ desire to play out their private moments before strangers. According to one 2000 source, The Real World received upward of 35,000 applications to appear on the show each year. Competitors such as Survivor and Big Brother joined the field even as individuals discovered that they could bypass them all by setting up shop as their own documentarians. The Internet by the late 1990s teemed with web cameras broadcasting “live feeds from their offices and boudoirs.” By the turn of the new century, a quarter-million webcam sites were registered, with more coming online every day.²¹⁰ Once again, as had been the case a century before, the camera was critical to the shifting relationship between private life and public persona—and right at the center of debates over what was becoming of privacy in modern America.

The Louds were not just precursors to this brave new world of self-display, but active participants in it. Ten years after the original PBS series aired, Susan and Alan Raymond made another documentary about the family. Titled An American Family Revisited (1983), it focused largely on how publicity had entered and then altered their private lives.²¹¹ Afterward, the filmmakers vowed never again to intrude on the family. But in 2001, reversing the usual positions of documentarian and subject, Lance Loud invited the Raymonds, who had remained friends, to start up their cameras. His request: that they film “one final chapter.” The occasion was Lance’s imminent death from complications of hepatitis C and HIV.²¹² According to the Los Angeles Times, Lance viewed this as his last shot at the screen and a chance to repair his family’s image—to prove to the American viewing public that the Louds were, in the words of Susan Raymond, a “strong family” and not a “disjointed, fractured” one. Tellingly, the newspaper reported, “He wanted to do it on camera … even though it was television that had also deeply wounded the family in the first place.”²¹³ It would be difficult to find a stronger testament than this to the idea that publicity makes people real, to the profound transformations that reality TV had effected in citizens’ consciousness, and to the confessional impulse itself. Lance Loud’s private life had been uniquely entangled with his televised self since age 19. Even as it ended, his sense that its message required a large, anonymous audience persisted.

Lance’s desire to have his last days broadcast may not be particularly shocking in an age when blogging, sexting, and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance have become normal. But it should be emphasized, as had been the case for his mother’s memoir (and also of a later biography she wrote of her son), that Lance was not intent on disclosure for its own sake. He had particular ends in mind. Most of all, he wanted to correct the record: to be known publicly as he knew himself.²¹⁴ He told the Raymonds that the film was “for the naysayers that claimed ‘American Family’ revealed us to be vacant, unloving, uncaring morons of the materialistic ’70s.” And he vowed that “this image will be proven wrong when Mom and Dad remarry.” The Raymonds agreed to the project. Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family, which PBS promoted as the “final episode” of the famous series, aired in January 2003, portraying Lance’s physical decline, as well as his attempt to “sort things out about his life.”²¹⁵ Uncannily, as if scripted beyond the grave, soon after the broadcast Pat and Bill Loud were reported to have reunited. In this they granted “one of their oldest son’s last wishes,” the Los Angeles Times observed. The film ended, “as Lance wanted, with a written epilogue stating that his parents, Pat and Bill, are now living together again.”²¹⁶

Lance’s biography, the newspaper reflected, was a “cautionary tale of the aftermath of a life profoundly affected at a young age by instant celebrity brought on by intense media exposure.”²¹⁷ In its analysis, the blurring of private and public matters had undone him. The New York Times echoed the sentiment in its obituary, reflecting that “overnight celebrity created special problems for Lance, as a young gay man in Manhattan.” The filmmakers concurred. Among the themes of the new film, said Alan Raymond, was the “price of media celebrity.” Lance, he observed, “carried the burden of being the first openly gay person on American television, frozen at age 19, forced to forever carry that wacky gay guy persona into his mature adult life”—a sentiment reminiscent of Susanna Kaysen’s reflections on her own interrupted life.²¹⁸ Lance Loud was, in other words, never able to return to a purely private life or to distinguish it from his public one. He was a known citizen all the way to his core, and this was a form of tragedy.

The makers of the series appeared scarred by the experience too. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Raymonds found it a “mixed honor” to be credited with reality TV, of the sort that flourished in the new century, judging shows like The Real World, in a word, “terrible.”²¹⁹ A retrospective on Craig Gilbert in the New Yorker in 2010—in response to yet another retread of the documentary, this time a fictionalized version of the making of An American Family for Home Box Office—also found the director uneasy with what he had wrought. Prolific up until that point, Gilbert never made another film after the 1973 series, and “he has spent the years since then trying to avoid the notoriety that came with his creation.”²²⁰ The article noted lasting animosity between the director and his crew, with Susan Raymond charging that “Craig destroyed that family.” The New Yorker suggested that battles over ownership were instead the cause: “the Raymonds are still bitter that they weren’t given proper credit for effectively creating reality TV.” Gilbert, for his part, “seems crushed by the knowledge that he did.”²²¹

Lance himself took a less anxious and ultimately more generous view of the phenomenon. Twenty-five years after his screen debut, he was asked to comment on “the genre of exhibiting somebody’s life” and whether “we’ve been exposed to too much of it.” He joked that the greatest contribution in his case was to supply a trivia question for the game show Jeopardy. Nevertheless, he thought An American Family had been worth doing: “It gave people solace. As for the invasion of privacy, we don’t have that much privacy in the first place, and offering other people comfort is a good way to spend it.”²²² Acknowledging the already existing limits to personal privacy at the turn of the twenty-first century, as well as the pleasures of disclosure, Lance’s reflections might get us closer than did his interpreters’ to understanding what a confessional culture offered to those who inhabited it.

In the three decades spanning the two PBS documentaries, private life—to a degree that would have astonished Americans of earlier generations—would be played out in public. A couple’s failing marriage and divorce, a woman’s struggle with psychological and sexual disorders, a daughter’s emotional suffering at the hands of her father, and a dying man’s final days became publicly visible and consumable in print, on screen, and online. Some proponents of the searing new standard of disclosure praised these developments for their honesty, arguing that they exposed exploitation and healed pain, enabling their audiences to form more empathetic imaginations.²²³ A greater number billed these same trends as voyeuristic and damaging, a sign of Americans’ emptiness—but also their misapprehension of the proper place of privacy in their emotional and psychic lives. Parties on both sides of this argument might have agreed that an era of privacy, as it had once been understood, was ending.

Was Lance’s last performance an act of control, a successful bid to take charge of his public image and vindicate a vision of his childhood? Or had TV, as he memorably charged on another occasion, “swallowed” his family? Was the documentary, and the whole apparatus of reality TV and self-broadcasting that it gave rise to, simply another sort of record prison? Or the only way to escape it? Were the new modes of public introspection in the late twentieth century, from confessional memoirs to talk shows and blogs, always and only a repudiation of privacy? Or were they a sign that a new relationship between the private person and the technologies of publicity was under construction?

If nothing else, the full-throated embrace of publicity at the turn of the twenty-first century—unimaginable to those who first called for a right to privacy a century before—made evident the ways past debates were impinging on the present. At least some portion of the impulse to disclose and become visible, to stage one’s public story by plumbing its private dimensions, was a response to what had come before. The urge to talk so palpable in our own age of social media was already there in the confessional turn of the 1990s. And underneath that confessional turn was both the expansion of the documentary record on all citizens and the failures of legal rights and regulations to enforce secure boundaries around the person. “This confessional age,” as one journalist put it, “in which memoirs and personal revelations tumble out in unprecedented abundance,” was in this light a long-germinating response to the dilemmas posed by a knowing society.²²⁴ Even if we conclude that the new mode of self-exposure exacted a price, we should not ignore the fact that it came with its own strategies for personal autonomy and control.

Americans did not simply start giving their privacy away or in any straightforward way change their minds about its importance in the late twentieth century. From a certain angle, privacy was valued more than ever in this era. So was the right to tell one’s own story. Critics who assumed that the confessional turn meant a weakening of America’s moral fiber or that citizens had become inexcusably self-consumed missed the complex of developments that made personal revelation so potent. They could not grasp the way that confession might turn the surveillance society inside out. Early in the twenty-first century, a commentator declared that “our physical bodies are being shadowed by an increasingly comprehensive ‘data body,’ ” a body of data, moreover, that “does not just follow but precedes the individual being measured and classified.”²²⁵ In such circumstances, continuous visibility on one’s own terms, whether through a memoir, a spot on reality television, or a status update, begins to look like a tactic—if not an unproblematic one—for defending a privately claimed identity.

The impulse to tell one’s story that reached such a pitch in the 1990s and is with us still charted a shift in social imaginings of privacy. In an era of dossiers and databases, tabloids and transparency, privacy no longer was to be found in cordoned-off places—indeed, such spaces no longer seemed to exist—but rather in the act of controlling one’s information and image, those pieces of external representation that more and more seemed to constitute one’s inner self. Shape the narrative; mobilize the facts and details of yourself; get out ahead of your critics; be your own image maker, editor, and producer; live out loud: this seemed to be the emerging practice of privacy at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both a symptom of and a solution to an all-knowing society, the trend suggests that the age of confession may be just beginning.