The Confession: three women mine the truth of motherhood

The Confession

Author: Jessie Burton

ISBN-13: 978-1509886142

Publisher: Picador

Guideline Price: £16.99

A short passage about a third of the way through The Confession appears to be deliberately elbowing itself in the ribs. Reclusive writer Constance (Connie) Holden is challenging her agent’s description of her new novel – her first in decades – as “a window on to difficult family dynamics”. It is diminishing to call her book that, Holden chides: “What about when a man writes about family? People don’t think he’s talking about his family. If a man writes about hoovering dust from the carpet they think he’s talking about cleansing one’s soul. But when a woman does the same, she’s talking about a hoover . . . They think we’re incapable of making stuff up. Seeing the bigger picture – when actually we’ve had to be best liars in town, the best impersonators.”

Toggling between LA in 1983 and the parallel track of Rose's attempt to infiltrate another woman's life in order to solve the mystery of herself

A spectre of impersonation, its protections and freedoms, shimmers over The Confession. Rose Simmons is willing to risk passing herself off as someone else (“Could I, if I wanted, invent a whole new biography for myself? I could eradicate Joe.”); former City broker Joe is half-heartedly trying to reinvent himself as the proprietor of a Mexican food truck; Rose and her mate Kelly employ a series of increasingly implausible nicknames (“Kettlebell” is one) for each other.

Yet it’s impersonation of another form that creates the novel’s emotional heft. In its exploration of motherhood, creativity, literature, relationships between women (friendships and sexual relationships), and the ambivalence of inhabiting a female body, The Confession reveals the extent to which women try and assume roles they have watched others play – or, thanks to a succession of absent, disinterested or disengaged mothers – roles for which they have only an ill-formed or mangled template. For better or worse, we are the product of those who make us, The Confession suggests: diverging from this path is difficult and painful, and has limited success. When Rose suspects that Joe’s mother blames her for her son’s lack of focus, she thinks crossly, “She’s his mother: she was there first!”

Beautiful young waitress Elise Morceau meets literary star Constance Holden on Hampstead Heath in 1980. When Connie’s novel is being made into a major movie two years later, Elise moves to LA with her. Connie is confident, alluring and ambitious, whereas, “Elise just wanted Connie. She wanted peace and calm, and small acts of living”. The death of Elise’s mother years earlier has left her rootless and uncertain, but since meeting Connie, “she had felt her heart maturing at speed like a peach in a heated laboratory . . . pushing away from the stone that had lived inside her always.” Three decades later, Rose Simmons, whose mother, Elise, disappeared when she was a baby, is haunted by lack. Her father reluctantly reveals that the last person to see Elise was reclusive writer Constance Holden, now long-gone from the public eye.

Parallel track

Toggling between LA in 1983 and the parallel track of Rose’s attempt to infiltrate another woman’s life in order to solve the mystery of herself, what appears to be a search for one mother leads to a forensic examination of motherhood. Though most succinctly described by Kelly as, “like being the most of everything, and the least of everything”, it is Connie’s perspective on motherhood which becomes central to the book’s exploration of creativity and the charge it places on life. For Connie, having children would mean being forced to live in the present, whereas writing is the opposite: “I live in a fabricated present, and I’m constantly making up a future as well – and reimagining the past. [. . .] I’ve spent such a long time where I live, in my head, that I don’t know whether I’m prepared to give up my citizen’s rights.”

Burton has commented before about a writer’s loss of the self. A couple of years after the success of her million-copy-selling debut The Miniaturist, she wrote, “A writer’s selfhood vies with her need to make herself invisible, in order to freely inhabit a simulacra of multiple lives in fiction (aka Ferrante), and work without worrying about her own received persona in all of it.” The Confession makes this reference to Ferrante additionally interesting: Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, an impersonation of another kind.

While men and fathers are opaque, their personalities and actions filtered through the women around them, the characters of Connie and Rose particularly are so complex and nuanced as to be completely believable. Connie’s energy is so absorbing that her decades of self-imposed seclusion and lack of creativity feel unconvincing, necessary for plot rather than character: she was so real I wanted to read her books. For a relatively slight plot, The Confession is long, the storytelling occasionally repetitive. Its heart and ambition are unwavering though, the characters perfect in their imperfection, in the way they – like any of us – play out old mistakes on new people.