Confessional writers who want to offer their readers more than a cheap thrill must first create a trustworthy persona. They may seem to come straight from the heart, but they wouldn’t exist had the authors not repossessed their minds. Their “I” isn’t blind with turmoil and emotion, but rather the “I” of the storm, calm amid chaos, or else the “I” of the needle, precise and sharp. To write about the self’s hot flushes, you have to be cold and detached.It’s important to emphasise this, because confessionalism is usually thought of as transparent and messy, a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. Perhaps the confessions heard during the Oprah Winfrey Show, or on radio phone-ins, or from garrulous cab drivers, are little more than a damburst of emotion.

This is emotion recollected in tranquillity or on tranquillizers – memoirs composed not on an alcohol- or drug-induced high but during recovery. Almost by definition, there has to be a happy ending: such “crisis memoirs” can be written only when the authors have put some distance between themselves and the material. “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,” said Wilde, “and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Writers who confess merely in order to make themselves feel better are likely to leave their audiences feeling worse. It takes special charm in a writer to make us look into our own hearts, or history, to see if there’s something comparable there It takes art Without art, confessionalism is masturbation.

Only with art does it become empathy.Many recent narrative non-fictions own up to weakness by telling tales of grief, breakdown, abuse, illness, depression and addiction Almost all of them end on an upbeat note. When the exchange doesn’t come off, the writer will feel grubby and the reader bullied. The famous “cleansing” process of catharsis is known by another name: “washing your dirty linen in public” Confessionalism has to know when to hold back Honesty has to be worked at. To say “I’m not perfect, and I know you’re not either” may be to stretch out a friendly hand, or merely presumptuous. Confessionalism is the art of the mirror, but the face in the glass can be ours as well as the author’s, an image we recognise but would rather not see.As this suggests, candour is a delicate business. It may be we feel that the author has said things that would have been better left unsaid.

But it may also be that he or she has disclosed awkward information about ourselves. In Britain, female confessionalism has been common enough in newspaper columns but (aside from Fiona Shaw’s Out of Me, Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire and one or two others) rarer in book form. We can feel awkward reading it in public, not because it’s samizdat or (like porn, say) subliterary, but because we feel somehow exposed by it – as if by reading it any stranger sitting nearby would be able to read us. Instead, the talk here has been of a new generation of men “in touch with their feelings” who expose these feelings to an almost indecent degree.Causing discomfort doesn’t make a writer good, but good writing can often cause discomfort.

Christopher Ricks once published a book called Keats and Embarrassment, about the blushfulness of Keats’s poetry, and with confessional writing embarrassment is inescapable. Behind them lie Maya Angelou’s autobiographical volumes, the slogan “The personal is political”, and the influence of women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss (about incest), Elizabeth Wurzel’s Prozac Nation, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Sallie Tisdale’s Talk Dirty to Me (addiction to pornography) Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story and Jill Ciment’s Half a Life (teenage delinquency) are prime examples. But he hoped that by recounting his godless behaviour he might make other miserable sinners better people – that the error of his way would lead others to choose the path of righteousness. Some such do-gooding motive used to be behind most confessional literature, including, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (on sex and love) and Thomas De Quincey’s (on addiction to opium): the revelation of the self is supposed to bring moral elevation to others These days, the emphasis isn’t moral but psychotherapeutic. With luck, one’s own murky tale will help those with similar experiences, who might otherwise suffer in silence, thinking they’re the only one – putting the book down, they will feel vindicated, validated, less pathological than they’d assumed.In the US, the new literature of self-revelation is perceived as a female form, the result of women finding their identities and voices. The tour is said to last three hours, but I bet it will be longer.