A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
The work that's interesting to me in other people is really confessional.
"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.
I hate the confessional. I love leaving the confessional. I hate going to the confessional. I would be a mess without it.
People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"
The new evangelization. . . begins in the confessional.
It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms.
As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.
The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.
I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.
Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.
If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.
A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional. . . where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.
We missed a lot of church, so the music is our confessional.
I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny.
The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.
A blog is neither a diary nor a journal. Many people think of blogging in relation to those two things, confessional or practical. It is neither but includes elements of both.
Talking about my personal life onstage, I've realized I'm not one of those comics who can do that. I can allude to it but I don't want to be a confessional performer.
