AustLit

'This paper explores the mechanisms of first and third party confession, and compares the different confessional approaches deployed in a range of memoirs including Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and my own book, The Last Thread. My paper examines the use of both implicit and explicit self-reflexive confessional gestures regarding the ethical boundaries of the texts that memoirists have written and argues that, despite the transparency that such gestures appear to offer the reader, it is largely through the separation of the roles of narrator and confessant that occurs through third party revelation – and consequently the disruption of the prescribed roles of writer and reader as the deliverer and receiver of confession – that memoirists can effectively decentre their own authority.' (Author's abstract)