THEY'VE GOT A SECRET

By CHARLES MICHENER

BLAME IT ALL ON JEAN-JACQUES Rousseau, whose Confessions shocked 18th century France with its author's admissions of sexual masochism and other private deviancies. The great philosopher didn't just help start the French Revolution with his writings; he ushered in a publishing genre--the confessional memoir. More than 200 years later the literary form is thriving. Not just the celebrity memoir in which show-biz and sports icons "tell all" about the pain behind the fame. More recently has come a flood of what might be called just-plain-folks memoirs--intensely personal yet highly literary accounts by noncelebrities about growing up in badly disturbed families, hiding terrible childhood secrets, overcoming severe psychological traumas--and exorcising it all by writing about it.

The secrets are as various as the exorcists. In The Blue Suit: A Memoir of Crime, just published by Houghton Mifflin (216 pages; $19.95), Richard Rayner, a British writer now living in Los Angeles, tells of how, while a Cambridge University undergaduate in the 1970s, he drifted into a yearlong crime spree of shoplifting, check forgery, housebreaking and bank fraud--following the mysterious disappearance of his father, who had been sent to jail for embezzlement. The writing is stripped-down Dostoyevsky ("My head itched. Cold sweat ran down my flesh...."), the overall effect as unnerving and oddly exhilarating as the life of a secret thief apparently was for the author.

Prairie Reunion by Barbara J. Scot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 230 pages; $21) is a bittersweet homecoming story tracing the author's return in middle age to the puritannical farming community where she grew up. In Scotch Grove, Iowa, she tries to piece together the puzzle of her mother's loving stoicism in the face of her father's humiliating desertion and subsequent suicide. Structured as a patchwork of conversations, childhood recollections and lyrical encounters with the land, Scot's quietly earnest quest yields her valuable understanding of her mother's reticence and a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of family connections and disconnections that can never be resolved.

In The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression (Putnam; 286 pages; $23.95), Tracy Thompson, a reporter for the Washington Post, provides a harrowing chronicle of her battle against the demon she calls "a psychic freight train of roaring despair." Thompson is uncommonly thoughtful on many levels--from her fearful childhood in a Southern fundamentalist family, to her confused entanglement with a harshly supportive man, to her hospitalization in a mental ward and her sunlit rescue by Prozac. Thompson's reporter's eye is unsparing, and she writes with tough grace. About one of her more hopeful moments: "Life did not get easier. But living did."

Childhood sexual abuse is a beast in many of these books. In Richard Hoffman's spare, poignant Half the House (Harcourt Brace; 175 pages; $20), it sneaks in almost laconically after the author has given us a searing picture of his blue-collar family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, with a violent but caring father and two brothers who are terminally ill. Hazy reverence for the Catholic saints is counterpointed with hazy submission to the sadistic coach who lures the author, then age 10, to his house with pornography and sodomizes him: "Induced, premature, with a hunger urgent as an infant's, my sexuality is born, a beggar."

Given the popularity of self-laceration on TV talk shows, it was inevitable that such memoirs would invade the literary world. "Now writers are not resorting to the veil of fiction," says Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "This is an era of self-revelation on all fronts, with literature bringing up the rear." Notes Ann Godoff, editorial director of Random House: "There's a trend toward reading in nonfiction what used to be relegated to fiction. It seems to have more of an immediacy if the story is real."

For the memoirists these books are more than just a form of self-therapy. "You don't write the book to heal yourself," says Hoffman. "You write to examine the way your consciousness was shaped." For Michael Ryan, the author of Secret Life: An Autobiography (Pantheon; 356 pages; $25), a masterly memoir of childhood sexual abuse and subsequent sexual addiction, the process of writing was "terrifying"; during it he joined a 12-step program. "The book forced me into finding a place emotionally and spiritually where I could write. It's a story about shame, and I needed to be somewhere I could see that."

Tracy Thompson says writing about her battle with depression was, oddly, "a pleasure, because things made sense for the first time." Only when she turned in the manuscript did she have second thoughts: "I was laid low by self-loathing. I had this voice in my head saying, people are going to laugh at you." Richard Rayner experienced a similar progression of emotions. At first it was "great fun" to expose his criminal past, he recalls, "The fun was the personal risk--to say things that are normally kept under wraps. Afterward I had great doubts whether to publish. It completely rearranged the way friends thought about me."

For some, the act of writing took surprising turns. Carolyn See, author of the brilliantly written Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America (Random House; 343 pages; $23), began with a "700-page, tear-stained first draft." As she revised it, the book went "from a tragedy to a comedy," and in the process "I fell in love with my family." Barbara J. Scot says her Prairie Reunion began as a "way of honoring my mother... I considered myself pretty much adjusted, but I cried my way through it."

What motivates this urge to confess in public? "The drive to be known, to be deeply understood by another human, is almost as strong as our sex and hunger drives," says Gerald Goodman, a professor of psychology at UCLA and a long-time student of self-disclosure. "But writing confessions can be easier than talking confessions. There's nobody to interrupt, ask questions, give advice, make interpretations." Confessional writers are not necessarily telling the whole truth, he cautions. "Book disclosures allow people to edit out the most shameful parts. I call this 'decoy disclosure.' I'm not persuaded that these writers are authentically repairing their lives. They're doing something that usually requires vulnerability to another person. But in this case, there's no other person--rather the whole world."

Nevertheless, readers seem to be responding. Mary Karr, whose chronicle of family chaos in East Texas, The Liars' Club (Viking; 320 pages; $22.95), was a surprise best seller earlier this year, discovered an "incredible kinship" with audiences on a tour of public readings from her book. "They were people from every walk of American life--bankers, professors, laborers, blacks, whites, literates and illiterates. Afterward they came up to the stage to tell me about childhoods far worse than mine, or some terrible family secret and how they were able to go on living and loving despite it. I learned that everyone has a dark patch in their history." And increasingly, it seems, everyone is eager to tell the world about it.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York