Helena Dea Bala’s Craigslist Confessional is many things: a popular website, a respite from the rat race, an ad hoc therapeutic modality, and now a book. It‘s a lesson in empathy, an injunction not to cast the first stone until you’ve walked a mile in someone else’s moccasins. Bala conceived the project—soliciting, transcribing, and anthologizing the darkest secrets of anonymous Craigslist volunteers—while having an existential crisis in her lobbying career. Weary of presenting a curated, Type A persona to the world, she turned instead to regular communion with imperfect strangers. “What story,” her project asks, “would you tell about your life if a stranger was willing to listen with no judgement, no stigma, and no consequences?”
In book form, Craigslist Confessional collects 40 stories grouped into sections of eight in the categories of Love, Regret, Loss, Identity, and Family. An introduction supplies Bala’s backstory, but she does not otherwise intrude upon her subjects’ tales of woe. There is no commentary. Nothing is corroborated or challenged. Any or all of these narrators could be unreliable. Indeed, though the book’s conceit encourages us to take the stories at face value (what’s the incentive to lie, anonymously, to a stranger?), the book is most rewarding when read between the lines. Like reality TV, it can be enjoyed by the glurge-addicted sentimentalist and the ironclad cynic in equal measure.
As the word “confessional” suggests, Bala is at least superficially aware of a precedent for the function she’s fulfilling. Anyone can confess to a priest—anonymously, behind a screen—or to a therapist, or, in some cases, to a police detective. It is precisely because these options entail judgment, stigma (the stigma of mental illness, perhaps), or consequences that they are a relatively unappealing salve to conscience. The aim of Craigslist Confessional is catharsis, not transformation. It is therapeutic for the teller and for readers, too, either on the principle that misery loves company or, worse, in the same way that observing the torments of the damned was once thought to be a selling point of heaven.
The accounts in the book’s five sections can be more sharply divided into two categories: stories in which the speaker recounts victimization, abuse, trauma, or tragedy and ones in which the speaker confesses to wronging others. In other words, these accounts are either passive or active, but even the wrongdoers manage to present themselves as victims of circumstance. “Sam,” 37, who confesses to cheating on his ex-wife with 19 people, blames loneliness: “I’d imagine her reaching over and touching my shoulder to comfort me, and I often think, now, how different things might have been had she ever done that.”
It is in the passive category that we find the book’s most heartbreaking stories: a man losing his spouse to Alzheimer’s; a woman whose husband’s verbal abuse amounts to pathological sadism; a veteran whose callous, self-centered wife turns his homecoming into a nightmare; a woman who, raped by her brother’s friend as a young girl, realized midway through the ordeal that her brother was watching from a doorway. A depressive hoarder drinks his own urine by mistake. A man abused by his uncle as a child finds the courage to tell his mother, only to discern in her reaction that she knew what her brother was up to all along. A South Carolina man recounts his lifelong experience of racism and reckons with how to raise children in a racist world.
These stories are affecting. How could they fail to be? But the response they elicit is arguably a shallow one. The reader feels sympathy or pity, perhaps a moment of recognition or identification, and then moves on to the next serving of human misery.
We read this stuff, so we may tell ourselves, to cultivate empathy. Yet we inhabit a culture of relentless self-disclosure, a culture that understands, from the college application to the Twitter thread to the bar stool, that trauma is currency. Many of these stories feel like the third or fourth thing you’d learn about a close friend, not the dead last, and certainly not the thing that most people would take to the grave. We do not value stoic reserve to a degree that might make the compilation of these accounts a courageous break with decorum. They complicate little about how we view ourselves. Are we just voyeurs, hiding behind our compassion?
Empathy is a greater challenge when we hear from subjects who actually do confess—to infidelity, mostly; to resenting the duties of parenthood; to committing crimes, developing a drug habit, or becoming a millstone around the neck of a loved one. The more jaded the reader, the more readily he or she recognizes the emotional and rhetorical strategies of rationalization and self-pity, the more Craigslist Confessional comes to serve, unwittingly, as an indictment of our buzzword conception of empathy.
As Roger Shattuck details in a quietly devastating chapter of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, “To understand all is to forgive all” is an old intellectual fashion but a misguided one. Among the thinkers who rejected what Shattuck terms the “empathy-sincerity plea” was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who recorded a vogue for it among juries in late 19th-century Russia. In our day, the well-meaning “empath” often trots out such a defense before a misdeed has even been committed yet. Many of the insights offered by Bala’s interlocutors are banal enough to have been available to them long before they “learned the hard way.”
An unpopular opinion: There is nothing that says the exercise of empathy must necessarily lead to understanding, let alone to forgiveness. Shattuck supplies, by way of Francois de La Rochefoucauld, a bracing dissent: “If the world were aware of the motives behind them, we would often be ashamed of our finest actions.” A truly honest “empath” might see how many of us do wrong in proportion to how readily, with a few tears and bromides, we anticipate justifying our conduct. Anyone credulous enough to doubt that a stranger might lie anonymously to Bala is gently reminded that we lie to our own faces all the time. But who can blame us? As Craigslist Confessional exists, for good or ill, to reassure its readers: We’re only human.