Observing, often with fatigue, the seeming ubiquity of self-revelation, self-exposure, and self-representation within contemporary media ecologies has become something of a commonplace. Though it might follow that contemporary pressures to disclose and declaim the self ceaselessly can inspire ennui, Christopher Grobe's The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV addresses confessional practices and performances not with weariness or disenchantment but with fresh energy and incisive wit. Moving through midcentury confessional poetry, stand-up comedy, feminist performance art, the monologues of Spalding Gray, and reality television, Grobe finds in the confessional mode not the apparent simplicity of bare revelation but an insistent application of style, artifice, and media to the project of performing the self—or, as Grobe describes the project of the artists included in the book, “ma[king] a life's work out of life-work” (xii).

The argument depends on four main chapters, which comprise telling and detailed case studies. The Art of Confession is therefore less a genealogy than a constellation of resonant sites, in which Grobe describes the work of artistic and popular confession as occasioning, in various contexts, a “breakdown . . . between voluntary and involuntary acts, between subjective and objective states, between private experience and public life” (20). In each, acts of confession are positioned as first and foremost performance—active, embodied work, but moreover, as Grobe sets forth in his introduction, “stylized doings,” in which any confessant's seeming artlessness is revealed as the product of significant artifice (viii). In the first chapter, devoted to the work of Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, Grobe attends as much to the poets’ voiced readings of their own works as to the texts they produced. Even as he makes impressive use of the poets’ archived letters, their manuscripts, and personal libraries (Sexton, it turns out, read Stanislavsky), he makes plain the centrality of “the interplay of text, voice, and body” to the confessional project, crucial to the enactment of confessional poems’ “truth” (61).

The second chapter examines 1970s feminist performance, most substantially in the work of artists such as Linda Montano and Eleanor Antin. Grobe uses the rhetoric and articulated principles of second-wave feminist consciousness raising to analyze their work, noting that midcentury feminists positioned CR as a kind of “confession without abjection” (98). Both drag and camp enter the chapter's orbit as the author charts the interdependencies that link performances of sincerity and irony, placing confession in relationship to masquerade, imposture, and role-play.

In the book's third chapter, Grobe explores how Spalding Gray's monologues—like the confessional poets’ readings—depended on a “confessional self” somehow “spark[ing] in that synapse between media,” relying on body and breath as well as language (175). In contrast to critical observations of Gray's apparent minimalism in performance, Grobe argues that Gray's solo performances employed “an utterly maximalist approach to media,” one that operated not unlike the Wooster Group's continuing intermedial project (153). Rejecting the notion that confessional monologue must have a special affinity for immediacy, Grobe notes how Gray loaded a deceptively simple wooden desk with piles of ephemera and his monologues with diverse artifacts from his lived experience; in making his confessions onstage, Gray was “constantly holding, wielding, reading, interpreting, and showing off scraps of writing and sound” (159). Despite Gray's affinity for words and language, Grobe argues, the resulting collage is best apprehended not as a masterful work of confessional writing, but as a performed demonstration of the impossibility of writing the self—leaving Gray, like Lowell, in the position of “a performer playing with and against the authority of confessional texts” (155).

The final chapter looks closely at The Real World, a US reality television series that Grobe sees as “heir to” the performance practices the book chronicles, responsible for bringing into the mainstream some of the principles that undergird the confessional mode: the notion of the self as a performed quantity, the certainty that it cannot be “captured, only conjured in live performance with the help of dead media,” and that the particular kind of acting involved in playing oneself can nonetheless “reveal as much as it obscures” (187). A final coda follows these concerns into the realm of social media, digital art, and campus protest.

The book's insights are rigorously produced and articulated, but also nimble and refreshingly frank. Its structure abets its purpose: in addition to the case studies that make up the four main chapters, a shorter critical interlude precedes each. This interstitial material effectively forges explicit connections among the book's major sites, often bringing recurring themes back to the fore, but the interludes also meaningfully shift the rhythm and tone of the book's address to its reader; it's tempting, if perhaps a stretch, to think of those rhythmic shifts as imbuing the text with something like the breath that Grobe describes as animating the confessional poets’ readings of their work. Throughout the text, too, the author offers playful asides that work as a kind of confession in miniature, marking the explicit performance of Grobe's writerly voice and persona. One effect of grouping together such a multitude of elements—some as substantial as a chapter, others as brief as a parenthetical quip—is the emergence of a wealth of spaces between and beside, as subjects, sites, and perspectives come together in artful juxtaposition and thoughtful overlap. In this, the book mirrors, or even takes part in, the kind of “styled media ecology” (x) that Grobe defines confessionalism to be.