Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession is subtitled “the writer’s private world”. It is comprised of excerpts from his notebooks, diaries and selected letters. Spanning 1961 to 2023, these documents sit at a small but decisive distance from the author, having been curated by his wife, Stephanie Miller.
I was wary, at first, of “confession” and “private world”. These words seemed to task the reader with divining Miller’s private life. But the book’s James Baldwin epigraph – “All art is a kind of confession” – disrupted this notion. Gentle teasing is by no means inconsistent with Miller’s fiction, where all is not as it seems.
