“The confessional booth felt like every other confessional booth I’d ever been in. The wood of the bench was so dark and uniformly grained that it looked fake, and the once-plush cushion atop it was now dingy and flat,” writes Isaac Fitzgerald in his memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury, 2022), in which he recounts the experience of confessing his sins to a priest when he was twelve at a church in Boston. In the passage, Fitzgerald both describes the physicality of the experience—the breath of the priest filling the confessional, hearing his disembodied voice—and maintains the intimacy of the first-person perspective, making the memory itself read like a confession. This week write a personal essay in the form of a confession. Does writing in this perspective change your narrative voice?
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