Freed From Behind The Paywall - Against Confessional Journalism
By a Confessional Journalist. From October 22
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It’s ironic reading this again in 2025, given that I have just published a series of highly personal posts about suffering acute depression. Just goes to show…something or other.
Now to today’s essay.
Something strange happened the decade I made my entry into the book world ( the 1990s)
Previously journalism had favoured discretion and objectivity. The author was outside of the story. There was the highly personal journalism found in the music press, influenced by the New Journalism pionered by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thomson and others in America. But in the mainstream UK newspapers, the old paradigm of ‘objectivity’; largely stuck. ‘Personal’ columns, if they appeared at all, mainly appeared in the ‘women’s pages’
In the 90’s everything changed - partly as the result of the success of a number of remarkable and very frank memoirs. They included Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’, Blake Morrison’s ‘And When Did You Lost See Your Father’ and Mary Karr’s ‘The Liar’s Club’ . My own, ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’, about the suicide of my mother and my struggles with depression, appeared in 1996 and won the PEN Award for Autobiography ( It is now a Penguin Modern Classic)
This shift in publishing was reflected in a shift in journalism. The personal was suddenly the popular. A great crowd of writers were commissioned by newspapers to fess up about their private life.
I was one of them. After ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’ appeared, I had no end of newspaper and magazine editors asking me to write about - well, everything. So long as it was personal. My parents, my children, my marriage, my childhood, my acquaintance with recreational drugs, how I met this person or that person, who my best friend was - the list went on and on.
I made a pretty good career out of it, spilling my guts for every media outlet that was interested. When I wrote a weekly column for the London Evening Standard in the early Noughties, all I ever got from my editor was, ‘make it more personal’. And I did not demur.
I wasn’t really that interested in privacy. I was happy to make my life public. After all, I am a great believer in openness, and the shut down/buttoned up of my parents world of the 1950’s I was keen to escape. Spontaneity was the thing, and ‘confession’. Whatever you did, good, indifferent or shameful, the public was keen to hear about it.
This process - for me - reached it apotheosis in the early 2010’s, when I was asked by The Guardian to write a weekly column about my family. I did so for six years.
This was the final column I wrote - which very much reflects the point I am trying to make in this essay:
My sense of unease about ‘confessional’ journalism has only deepened since that article. Now I hate to write about my life. I don’t like the fact then when I’ve been out on dates ( I’m divorced) the woman I am meeting up with can Google me and find out everything they want to about my entire personal history. Apart from anything else, it doesn’t give my much left to talk about. I’ve essentially run out of fresh material by the time dessert comes.
It feels obscene somehow, nowadays. As I say in the final Guardian column, I have no regrets about it all, but the continuing determination of writers to talk about their cancer, their mental struggles, their polyamorous adventures, their sudden midlife affection for dogging or whatever - it just feels off.
This may seem to be a statement of hypocrisy by someone who has made a lot of money washing his dirty laundry in public. Fair comment, I suppose. But people are allowed to change, and to change their minds. As far as I am concerned, I will never write another confessional piece or confessional book for the rest of my life. In my view there was a time for this, but - you might say - the Zeitgeist feels exhausted.
Or perhaps it’s just me that’s exhausted. Nowadays if I have private matters to share, I share them with my friends, if at all. I no longer want to vomit my life onto the page. Privacy, so valued by my late parents, suddenly seems less of a neurosis and more a path of dignity and restraint.