Writing the Self: The Hazards of Confession, the Power of Witness
What much first-person writing gets wrong about intimacy, and how to revise your voice from confession to witness.
Hello! How is your writing going? I am back in my manuscript, trying to figure out what the hell it is and wants to be. I’m in that messy stage two, where you have a lot of material, and now you have to figure out what actually belongs and where you have taken some wrong turns. There is also a missing third act to figure out…. Which is to say: there is something I don’t understand yet about what the book is up to, which is both exciting and terrifying. I’m going to be watching lots of films and reading lots of novels to try to understand the connection I’m still simply failing to make in my own mind: a missing image, a missing link or idea. And so this week’s newsletter is about something I’m thinking about as I revise: confession vs. witness, plus the power of objective correlatives, or images, in building a multi-layered “I” on the page. Let me know what you think!
In the first pages of Real Estate, the third book in her “Living Autobiography,” three books about navigating a writer’s life after a divorce, Deborah Levy recounts purchasing a banana tree from a flower stall outside Shoreditch High Street Station. The plant is in some sense impractical, but she buys it anyway, lured by. She drags it home—not in triumph but with a kind of private urgency. The banana tree, which, as she puts it, “seduced me with its shivering, wide green leaves but also with the new leaves that were furled up, waiting to stretch out into the world,” becomes a recurring motif throughout the memoir, symbolizing her desires, transitions, and the concept of home. That image of a tree ready for a “more humid life”—waiting to “stretch out into the world”—teaches us how to read this closely observed and in some ways uneventful book; this is a book of interior weather and of new starts, about a woman who is also, after divorce, with kids getting older, unfurling her leaves.
Levy’s narrative moves from the banana tree to reflections on the flower seller’s “luscious” fake eyelashes, which she imagines stretching “from the grey cobblestones of East London… to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico,” leading her to think about Georgia O'Keeffe and the uncanny nature of her paintings of flowers, and a visit she took to O’Keeffe’s final home in New Mexico. This progression of images delivers her to her longing for “a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace.” As she goes on to explain, “I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.”
Where confession seeks release, witness seeks understanding—not just of the self, but of its place in the world.
This kind of writing—the evocative, sidelong gesture toward interior life, sliding from action that seems trivial to deep insight—feels especially resonant to me now, as I work on my new book, which very much works in this mode. I’m drawn more and more to first-person writing that does not confess or explain, but witnesses. Writing in which the self isn't presented as a solved puzzle but as a site of ongoing observation. In which the “I” doesn’t constantly look inward, but records as a way of loking inward. Think of Barthes in Mourning Diary, scribbling fragments of grief that never congeal into narrative—a journal, yes, but a journal that is always interested in the work of witness, which is bound up with naming and thinking, with a critic’s point of view. Think, too, of Annie Ernaux, whose “I” in The Years is mostly absent, or implied/shared—diffused across generations, weather, brands of shampoo, political slogans, a nation’s changing fashions. The self emerges through pattern, not just interiority.
Below, I offer a set of concrete revision techniques I use in my own work—along with a prompt designed to unsettle the self just enough to let clarity emerge, as well as more explanation of how this style of writing works. This one should work for poets, fiction writers, and memoirists/essayists, I hope.
This post continues below for subscribers, including a method I use for editing first-person prose into something both more expansive and more precise.