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In a sardonic poem of 1940, composed just after his migration to the United States from Great Britain, W.  H. Auden memorialized an “Unknown Cit- izen.” Written in the form of an epitaph for an “unknown” and yet all- too- knowable citizen, the poem offers a capsule biography of an unnamed indi- vidual from the point of view of the social agencies charged with tracking and ordering his affairs. The citizen it commemorates is identified by a string of code similar to a U.S. Social Security number— “JS / 07 / M / 378”— and his life amounts to a compendium of details gathered by employers, hospitals, schools, psychologists, market researchers, insurers, journalists, and state bu- reaus. The poem’s final lines point si mul ta neously to the hubris and the limits of society’s knowledge of this man. “Was he free? Was he happy? The ques- tion is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”1

If seldom as eloquently as Auden, con temporary Americans raised sim- ilar questions about those who sought to know them, whether for the purpose of governance or profit, security or con ve nience, or social welfare or scholarly research. Indeed, the proper threshold for “knowing” a citizen in a demo cratic, cap i tal ist nation would become in the twentieth century one of Americans’ most enduring debates. How much should a society be able to glean about the lives of its own members, and how much of oneself should one willingly reveal? What aspects of a person were worth knowing— and to whom— and which parts were truly one’s own? Where and when could an individual’s privacy be guaranteed? As the century advanced, the questions became more insistent. Were private spaces and thoughts, undiscovered by others, even pos si ble under the conditions of modern life? What would

Introduction

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 8 . H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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an ever more knowing society mean for the people caught in its net— and for the individual liberties that Americans supposedly prized? To wit: Could known citizens be happy? Were they, in fact, free?

This book borrows the poet’s questions to pry open the contentious career of privacy in the modern United States. Individual privacy first sur- faced as a sustained po liti cal issue only in the late nineteenth century, but it would swiftly become a fixture— even fixation—of U.S. public culture. As corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, so too did disputes over what sort of prying and how much probing into citizens’ lives were acceptable. These debates emerged alongside an increasingly impersonal, urban society: its techniques for maintaining so- cial order but also its mass media, its scientific technologies as well as its styles of selling. Privacy talk waxed and waned, following no predict- able path. But it closely tracked public attention to the perils—and the promise—of being a known citizen.

Modern privacy sensibilities were honed at the crux of a contradiction. Even as Americans grasped at wider freedoms in the twentieth century, they, like Auden’s protagonist, were becoming ever more intelligible to an expanding array of parties: state bureaucracies and law enforcement; the popu lar press and marketers; financial institutions and private corpora- tions; scientific researchers and psychological experts; and, eventually, data aggregators and proprietary algorithms. A knowing society impinged on individual liberties in unsettling ways. Being known could bring pun- ishment from the state or destroy a reputation crafted for peers; it could raise one’s insurance rates or cost someone a job. It could even compro- mise one’s free will and sense of au then tic personhood. Because they pos- sessed this capacity to know, modern social institutions raised Auden’s questions quite directly. Emerging technologies and media, novel modes of expert and corporate surveillance, and new practices of official docu- mentation all propelled the prob lem of individual privacy to the foreground of U.S. public culture. There it would remain, becoming more and more central to citizens’ assessments of their state and social order.

Americans turned to privacy talk because it helped them navigate the pull and push of a knowing society, one that sought to apprehend, govern, and minister to its members by capturing them in fuller and finer detail. Such a society carried rewards as well as risks. The proliferation of tech- niques for rendering citizens knowable, from credit reports and CCTV

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cameras to psychological testing, promised opportunity and security, even self- understanding. But being known too well— through the monitoring of one’s sexual or consumption habits, for instance— could threaten personal autonomy, undermining the notion of a free- standing individual so foun- dational to U.S. politics and culture. In like fashion, to remain unrecog- nizable was in certain contexts a sign of privilege, but in others a form of disempowerment. Being traceable in a national criminal or DNA database was a dif fer ent matter than being identifiable to a benefits- granting pro- gram like Social Security. It was pos si ble, that is, to suffer not only from too little but also from too much privacy. Invisibility to ser vice providers or census takers could sharply limit one’s social opportunities and legal rights.2 Whereas one’s individual dignity might require being shielded from public view in some contexts, in others it could demand just the opposite: the vali- dation of being named and seen. A longing for public recognition could oscillate with a desire for obscurity, even within the same person. And so, whether one could be known accurately and authentically— and on one’s own terms, rather than the larger society’s— was yet another question ani- mating privacy’s presence in American public life.

Arguments about privacy were really arguments over what it meant to be a modern citizen. To invoke its shelter was to make a claim about the latitude for action and anonymity a decent, demo cratic society ought to afford its members. Responses to that claim exposed the fault lines of civic membership. Which citizens, after all, could be entrusted with privacy, and therefore be liberated from official scrutiny? Because privacy could both foster intimacy and nurture vice, it came packed with assumptions about the kind of person entitled to it. And so, although privacy was obvi- ously not the only way to talk about citizenship in the twentieth century, any conversation about privacy was already entangled with ideas about one’s status in the broader society. How much privacy, for example, ought to be allotted to prisoners, soldiers, patients, or teen agers? When could dif fer ent sorts of sexual subjects— male, female, straight, gay, married, unmarried— claim its mantle? Under what social and economic conditions could a person be said genuinely to have privacy, and how on a daily basis did one’s class and race shape access to it? More generally, who had the ability to keep parts of their lives secret? Conversely, who could be recog- nized and appraised for who they truly were? The degree and nature of privacy that individual Americans enjoyed— including who could demand

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it and under what circumstances— were ways of defining, and divvying up, civic membership. No won der, then, that privacy would become a dominant theme of twentieth- century politics.

To conceive of privacy as a social benefit and a mark of belonging enlarges the standard meaning of citizenship as a status conferred and regu- lated by the state.3 Auden’s anonymous subject, after all, was defined not simply by his nationality but also by his many other quasi- civic roles: em- ployee, union member, father, neighbor, and consumer. “The Unknown Citizen” points us to the ways that full inclusion in an industrial democracy was a matter of one’s capacity to move relatively freely through a force field of social institutions, private as well as public. For citizens themselves, it is clear, “citizenship” was never merely a juridical status, but instead a looser, more expansive marker, gesturing to one’s ability to exercise choice and autonomy in the many realms of social life.4 Like them, this book em- ploys the term “citizen” in its most capacious sense. Privacy, understood as freedom from intrusion or scrutiny, could by these lights sometimes act as a substitute for explic itly enunciated rights. Its absence— via formal law or in- formal circumstance— could work to deny even full citizens equal social standing. Asserting how one could be known in the workplace or the marketplace, on a city street or in a suburban bedroom, was a claim to self- determination as well as social power. Americans in the twentieth century thus made of privacy much more than a legal right. They made it foundational to their sense of personhood and national identity.

Privacy has played a vital po liti cal and cultural role in the modern United States. But it has largely eluded scholars. This book pursues its his- tory from a new vantage point: the question of how Americans would, and should, be known by their own society. Across the last century and a half, tabloid journalism and new technologies, welfare bureaucracies and po- lice tactics, market research and personality testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell- all memoirs and social media all posed this question. In response, jurists and phi los o phers but also ordinary citizens weighed the advantages and hazards of being known. They would, in the pro cess, remake conventions about access and intimacy, redrawing the bor- ders separating the private from the public self. Trained on how citizens approached unfamiliar practices of identification and intrusion, rec ord keeping and revelation, this book illuminates the deeply personal— but also profoundly social and political— meanings they attached to private matters. Spanning the long twentieth century, from the era of “instantaneous photo-

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graphy” to our own age of big data, it offers a wide- angle view of privacy as Americans have argued and imagined it.

Privacy, it scarcely needs saying, looms large today. If the drumbeat of headlines and bestsellers is to be believed, Americans are in the midst of an unpre ce dented privacy crisis— under “relentless surveillance,” on the road to a fully transparent society, and with “no place to hide.”5 The ingredients of this crisis are well known to us. Data mining and NSA spying, recommendation algorithms and electronic footprints, bio- metric identification and extensive information sharing on social media platforms have raised fears about government and corporate surveillance to a high pitch. That a certain standard of protection from the gaze of others is routinely violated, and perhaps unrecoverable, is widely decried.

In this climate of worry about any number of parties and techniques that expose us against our wishes, privacy seems self- evidently a po liti cal matter. Despite privacy’s starring role in con temporary diagnoses of U.S. culture, however, we have a surprisingly poor grasp of how it arrived there. Certainly, privacy has figured for centuries as an essential ingredient in theorists’ formulations of liberal selfhood. Almost endlessly elastic, the term has, since its first appearance in En glish in 1534, accrued religious, philosophical, social, po liti cal, legal, and psychological dimensions.

Yet privacy was not always a matter of public import for Americans. As a topic for widespread popu lar debate or as a common public language, it is a creature almost entirely of the late nineteenth century. Born of disquiet about the status of the private person in the post– Civil War United States and an age when the contents of citizenship were under reconstruction, modern privacy arrived on the scene si mul ta neously prized and endan- gered. A new form of privacy talk took hold in this era, with mounting num- bers of citizens both claiming a right to privacy and believing their privacy to be under siege. Only in the twentieth century did privacy emerge as a central concern of American life, with some commentators going further, tagging it an obsession or a “cult.” 6 And only then was it vigorously pursued as a public, and sometimes collective, claim. “Privacy” gained an unusual capacity to frame Americans’ discussions about the state, their social institu- tions, and even themselves. This is a story that is still unfolding, of course.

Privacy may have made a late entrance into U.S. politics and public life, but its staying power has been impressive. Nearly every major development in the United States since the Civil War— public health campaigns, media

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and communications technologies, military mobilization, social welfare legislation, workplace innovations, therapeutic methods, urban planning and suburbanization, social movements, criminal and terrorist threats— has been assessed in terms of its implications for citizens’ privacy. Privacy talk has coursed through realms as dif fer ent as bioethics and celebrity, national security and architecture, social etiquette and professional codes. At least since the turn of the twentieth century, it has also been demo cratic: just about anyone can demand privacy, if not achieve it. Immigrants, laborers, schoolchildren, and prisoners have all laid claim to the concept. It has featured as regularly in science fiction as in scholarship, in poetry as in po liti cal commentary. Invoked as an essential freedom and even a human right, yet worried over as a fragile and perhaps dying value, privacy became in the twentieth century a dominant concern of modern publics around the globe.7 In the post– World War II United States, concerns over its status gathered enough momentum to launch a new constitutional right. Since then, it is safe to say, privacy’s role in the American public sphere has only intensified.

Privacy in the modern United States thus has not been “private” at all. Rather, it has functioned as a crucial category of public life and a durable feature of partisan politics, even as its availability—or absence— has shaped countless personal choices and relationships. Highly vis i ble contretemps over what should be kept out of the public eye across the last century fun- damentally shaped U.S. po liti cal culture. The same is true today, even as a large body of writing declares that privacy is dead and gone.8 In fact, pri- vacy has never been more pres ent in American life. It informs pundits’ and citizens’ discussions of topics ranging from the social be hav ior of youth to airport screening procedures, and from online search tracking to state intelligence operations. It regularly punctuates public life as a policy con- cern, a legal claim, and an individual hope.

The modern concept of privacy, as even this brief sketch makes clear, is sprawling. It has for good reason prompted voluminous scholarship in law, philosophy, lit er a ture, communications, design, technology, and the newer field of surveillance studies. Yet inquiries into its past have been curiously confined. As I worked on this book I kept arriving at a paradox: privacy is everywhere in modern Amer i ca and yet hardly anywhere in modern Amer- ican history. Arguably one of the most charismatic words in the national lexicon, privacy is missing from the indexes and headings by which we or- ga nize our understanding of the past. Key episodes in the legal history of

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privacy are well charted, as are specific controversies. But the scholarship remains heavi ly state- and rights- centered, neglecting privacy’s significance as a cultural sensibility and public value. Historical works that examine the idea of privacy in all of its unruliness, or even some of it, are scarce, espe- cially for the twentieth century— the period in which it entered national life with force.9

Existing histories of privacy are typically narrower affairs: explanations of the emergence of privacy rights, trained on doctrine, pre ce dent, and policy. Legal scholars have devoted much attention to the first widely rec- ognized demand for a “right to privacy” in 1890, the codification of state privacy laws over the ensuing de cades, and the enunciation of privacy as a constitutional right in 1965.10 These works treat the evolution of jurispru- dence as a proxy for less neatly contained shifts in Americans’ thinking about intimacy and intrusion. But such studies do not dwell on changes in citizens’ sensibilities or on the reasons behind them. Scholarship on pri- vacy’s technical, juridical career has thus made little impact on our under- standing of the politics and culture of modern Amer i ca. Privacy as such makes only a brief—if dramatic— appearance in standard textbook surveys, usually beginning in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut and cresting in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. It bursts on the scene as a po liti cal prob lem, is transformed into a constitutional if controversial right, and, thus dealt with, promptly vanishes again.

There are excellent accounts that take up aspects of the history of pri- vacy, especially concerning sexual regulation, the popular press, and state spying.11 Each of these is a massive and complex topic in its own right. But fixing on a single strain of privacy’s history can be misleading. For example, the two leading narratives about privacy in the United States— its eradica- tion through state, workplace, and electronic surveillance, on the one hand, and its gradual, if tenuous, triumph through hard- won criminal or reproductive rights, on the other— point toward radically opposed conclu- sions.12 Impor tant as such scholarship is, it cannot do justice to privacy’s wide- ranging, generative role in U.S. public culture. It cannot explain why Americans have so regularly turned to privacy to talk about such unlike things: their intimate relationships, their living spaces, their personal data, their po liti cal rights, and even their psyches. And it cannot account for why citizens’ understandings of and feelings about privacy have evolved over time. Yet precisely what we require is a history of privacy’s per sis tent, pli- able appeal. Only by attending to its arrival in disparate spheres— law and

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technology, medicine and media, lit er a ture and architecture— will we be able to fathom how privacy came to sit at the very core of American politics and social life.

My panoramic approach attempts to overcome what is thus far a patch- work history. This book deliberately peers into other wise unrelated do- mains in U.S. society in order to piece together a new picture of how and why privacy came to matter so much to modern Americans. Rather than lament privacy’s disappearance, as do so many recent commentators, I track privacy’s appearances in the U.S. public sphere, asking: When and why did privacy make its claims on citizens’ attention? In what terms, and with what consequences? How, in the pro cess, were Americans’ expecta- tions of privacy not simply diminished but transformed?

What, indeed, made privacy such a compelling idiom, brought to bear on topics as varied as intelligence gathering and confessional memoirs? Pri- vacy talk, I argue, has been a response to, and sometimes a resolution of, an inescapable impasse of modern life: the fact that, even as U.S. public culture purported to honor the will and choices of individual citizens, its agencies pressed in new and forceful ways on the private person. “Privacy” rarely referenced a thing with definite contents; rather it served as an index to changing ideas about society itself.13 Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe captures this sense of privacy when he describes it as “nothing less than society’s limiting princi ple.”14 And indeed, citizens enlisted it, time and time again, to fix the line between the modern person and the col- lectivities to which she or he belonged.

To call something private, an option more and more Americans exer- cised in the twentieth century, was almost never to make recourse to an agreed-on definition. It was to make an argument about the proper rela- tionship among citizen, state, and society. Sociologist Christena Nippert- Eng puts it this way: “privacy is about nothing less than trying to live both as a member of a variety of social units—as part of a number of larger wholes— and as an individual— a unique, individuated self.”15 The topic of privacy invited, even incited, grassroots social theorizing about power and intimacy, surveillance and subjectivity. It was the public vocabulary citi- zens reached for to debate the scope of the state, the conduct of social re- lations, and the very borders of the self.

More specifically, privacy was the language of choice for addressing the ways that U.S. citizens were— progressively and, some would say,

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relentlessly— rendered knowable by virtue of living in a modern industrial society. Given the number and range of parties that aspired to know them, Americans rightfully wondered what aspects of one’s body, personality, identity, biography, and data an individual had ultimate claim to. In dif- fer ent ways, a candid photo graph, a financial rec ord, and a psychiatric di- agnosis each raised this question: How distinct from the mesh of institu- tions, practices, and norms that constituted social existence could a person actually be? Privacy talk attempted to bridge the tension between ex- panding claims to personal inviolability and more sophisticated methods of infringing on it. It mediated, too, between the desire to be “let alone” and the urge to be known. These tensions created special prob lems in a national culture staked on personal autonomy. Invoking privacy was one of the chief ways that Americans of all stripes weighed in on an enduring po- liti cal and philosophical quandary as to what separated self from society.16

And yet, as we would expect, privacy was not a shared or unitary con- cern, but was experienced and summoned in markedly uneven ways in the American twentieth century. Citizens viewed and wielded privacy dif- ferently depending on their status and circumstances, and some could barely access it at all. As a general rule, those excluded from full po liti cal citizenship because of their class, race, gender, age, nationality, able- bodiedness, or sexuality—or combinations thereof— also suffered most from a lack of privacy.17 Prisoners and other institutionalized populations, but also the young, the poor, and the infirm, had few defenses against the intrusive monitoring of their lives. Racial minorities, immigrants, and noncitizens were subject to far higher rates of police and bureaucratic surveillance than were white native- born Americans; intensely scrutinized, they were perhaps always less deeply known by agents of the dominant society.18 Women and sexual minorities were presumed to have a lesser claim on privacy than heterosexual men, and as a result they came first to the rec- ognition that altering privacy’s terms through disclosure and confession might be the path to a more inclusive public sphere.

In contrast, owning a home, making a comfortable living, and con- forming to dominant norms of respectability all decidedly increased one’s chances of evading society’s gaze. And yet it was often white middle- class citizens who denounced privacy invasions most vociferously. This has led some to consider privacy talk a bourgeois pastime, the preoccupation of a select part of the population.19 Elite Americans have sometimes embraced that characterization; privacy, noted the prominent nineteenth- century

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editor E. L. Godkin, was “one thing to a man who has always lived in his own house, and another to a man who has always lived in a boarding- house.”20 It is undoubtedly the case that privacy debates in the United States came with a class profile. As privileged citizens felt the press of social institutions on their own lives and liberties, their par tic u lar worries be- came the fodder for media coverage, congressional hearings, and public policy. But it is also evident that privacy’s promise beckoned, if in a variety of registers, to a wider swath of Americans, including juveniles, patients, soldiers, union members, research subjects, and welfare recipients. As W. H. Auden—an immigrant to the United States and a gay man— well understood, the extent to which an individual could be rendered know- able was full of consequence in a modern nation.21 The efflorescence and democ ratization of privacy talk over the course of the twentieth century were testament to that fact.

Precisely because privacy in the United States has been billed as a per- sonal possession, outside the realm of the state or politics, its history opens an illuminating win dow onto the social strains of modern citizenship. Across the last century privacy was increasingly linked to that most public of identities, the rights- bearing citizen. Privacy talk thus became a potent avenue for claiming and circumscribing the social benefits of a modern in- dustrial democracy. At the same time, insisting on recognition—as a citizen, a holder of a specific identity, a person out of the shadows— was basic to enacting one’s membership in society. How well known a citizen would be was a sensitive marker of status and power, a fissure like any other cutting across professions of equality and opportunity in American life.

Charting the travels of something as abstract, but also as intimate, as “pri- vacy” has its challenges. To begin with, the question of what privacy is has long bedev iled legal and philosophical discussions. In the course of re- searching this book it was amusing, if also sobering, to come across other observers’ frustrations with how ungovernable a subject it is. “Few values so fundamental to society as privacy have been left so undefined in social theory or have been the subject of such vague and confused writing by social scientists,” charged legal scholar Alan Westin in 1967.22 Forty years later, Daniel Solove, a leading theorist of privacy, branded it “a concept in disarray.”23 Like the weather, concluded a sociologist in 2016, privacy is “much discussed, little understood, and not easy to control.”24 A large body of work nevertheless offers ever- finer taxonomies of privacy’s “spatial,” “deci-

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sional,” “aesthetic,” “proprietary,” and “informational” dimensions.25 But these efforts have considerable limitations for the historian. If we want to understand how Americans in varied contexts and times understood pri- vacy, we need to abandon the notion of it having a stable definition. We cannot treat the bundle of ideas that inform modern privacy as transhistor- ical or ahistorical, a timeless princi ple waiting to be discovered, as in the abstract “right” to privacy— itself a puzzle since no such right was enunci- ated in formal legal terms in the United States until 1890.

The history offered here undercuts assumptions that there is something essential, even constitutional, about the concept. I argue that “privacy” has served in the United States as a catch- all for concerns about modern life and social organ ization, from new forms of media and technology to new state proj ects, new kinds of expert intervention, and even new living arrangements. As Americans reckoned with these developments, and par- ticularly what they entailed for personal bound aries and individual rights, privacy itself—as an idea and a practice— evolved. In entertaining novel understandings of what could be asked and what could be said, what could be exposed and what should be disclosed, citizens shifted the very contents of “public” and “private,” even as they regularly treated those categories as a fixed feature of social life.

In contrast to virtually every recent book on the subject, then, mine is not an account of what happened to the privacy Americans once, and seemingly straightforwardly, enjoyed. Instead it recounts what has hap- pened to citizens’ thinking about privacy— and, just as significant, what privacy has allowed them to think about. Threats to Americans’ solitude and security changed dramatically over the last century. Their expecta- tions about privacy shape- shifted in response. In certain eras, privacy de- bates focused most intently on incursions into personal space; in other periods, on violations of individual bodies, psyches, data, or peace of mind. Although citizens at times seemed to crave privacy, at others they were insensible to its importance or deliberately repudiated it. In the name of personal dignity—or autonomy or liberation— some wrapped a cloak of privacy around themselves, whereas some tore it off or tried to strip it from others. Americans never all conceived of privacy in the same way, of course. Nor did they all attend to, or participate equally in, such debates. What remained remarkably consistent, however, was their recourse to privacy as a way of arguing about their society and its pressures on the person.

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Here, the same imprecision that vexes theorists proved to be privacy’s true po liti cal value. Privacy, it turns out, has been a highly flexible con- tainer for social thought. The various domains in which Americans in- voked privacy had little in common. But the questions that provoked the claim— who had the right to know, what ought to be publicly known, and who and what should remain unknown— were surprisingly stable, linking debates over print journalism in the 1890s to debates about confessional memoirs a century later, and contests over state filing systems in the 1930s to those over commercial algorithms in the pres ent. Privacy may have been an inadequate vocabulary for that range of concerns, as a number of ob- servers pointed out along the way. But the fact that so many items huddled together under its umbrella suggests privacy’s indispensability as a medi- ator of modern social life.

Privacy is, fi nally, a tricky historical quarry because it refers to those matters one hopes to keep out of the public eye, to those corners of life that are off- limits or beyond scrutiny. And yet, at many points across the last century, privacy went public as it were, suddenly becoming vis i ble in editorial pages, congressional hearings, and popu lar protests. To get at its changing contours, I take my cues from major controversies that had privacy at their core, whether in the form of “instantaneous photo graphs,” Social Security numbers, or reproductive rights. A focus on public debates naturally leaves much hidden. This book cannot speak to the irreducible diversity of the ways Americans experienced privacy in their daily lives. Yet national debates can hint at more intimate ones, and what these disputes disclose is how regularly private matters have reshaped the public domain. Moments of uncertainty over the borders of public and private threw the concepts themselves into sharp relief, rendering cultural norms, and their transformation, vis i ble. Attending to those moments moves us beyond elite commentary and legal arguments, getting us closer to the complex texture and meanings of modern privacy.

When did Americans call for privacy or give it up, and how did this de- pend on the setting: a bedroom, a laboratory, or a government office? Which citizens felt privacy’s lack—or publicity’s glare— most keenly? With what words did they defend their claims to privacy or argue about its viola- tion? How were such beliefs, even deeply cherished ones, revised? Exam- ining what a diverse array of Americans made of privacy, I document how conventions about access, intimacy, and disclosure were built but also dis- mantled. And I replace a now- familiar narrative about the “end of privacy”

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with one that recognizes both the curtailing of old privacies and the in- vention of new ones over time. That history cannot be told in linear fashion. And so I pick up the threads of par tic u lar privacy debates when they first appeared and let them go when others gained ground, without carry ing each story to its conclusion. Rather than retell the history of photography, policing, research ethics, or “outing”— although portions of each of those histories appear here— I have sought to follow in the tracks of the known citizen.

No one book could capture the whole of this story or every angle of U.S. privacy debates. But by alighting on a series of critical episodes, this one aims to illuminate both the prominence and the significance of privacy talk in the modern American public sphere. That story begins in new un- derstandings of the “inviolate personality” in the late nineteenth century and culminates— though does not end— with the emergence of a national “confessional culture” in our pres ent. In between, I showcase pivotal mo- ments when privacy talk became concentrated and consequential.

The first such moment came in the 1890s, when Victorian norms of propriety and respectability collided with mass- media technologies and prompted the first modern call for a “right to privacy.” The second was oc- casioned by the rise of the administrative state in the early de cades of the twentieth century, which heightened anx i eties about the government’s ca- pacity to cata log and monitor its citizens. By mid- century, the intersection of a full- blown national security apparatus with more intimate forms of prying—in suburban communities, therapists’ offices, the white- collar workplace, the public school, and the consumer market— riveted public attention on the invasiveness of American culture itself.

In the 1960s, in response to this series of technical and cultural develop- ments, privacy gained new status as a constitutional right, becoming a cor- nerstone of Americans’ popu lar lexicon of entitlements. Yet the fragility of that right in an era of advancing social and scientific research, government surveillance, and computer data banks meant that privacy concerns did not fade away. Instead, they were aroused anew, ushering in altered norms around confidentiality, consent, and access. In the 1970s and beyond, po- liti cal demands for transparency, exposure, and disclosure—by one light privacy’s opposites— redrew the borders between society and citizen. By the end of the century, the commercialization of surveillance along with the outflow of confessional talk would prompt many to conclude that there was no longer any privacy in the United States, nor even any desire for it.

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Yet privacy talk erupted with force once again in the twenty- first century, triggered by the arrival of social media, big data, and startling exposés of just how well corporations and the state could know individual citizens.

The ways Americans debated the fate of personal privacy in the late nineteenth century can sound strangely familiar in the twenty- first, espe- cially citizens’ conviction that threats to privacy were new and uniquely compromising of individual liberties. Impor tant continuities do in fact mark this history. Yet there have also been striking transformations, which we can only understand by reference to the prob lem of the known citizen.

One was Americans’ turn from an emphasis on tangible claims to privacy—in the form of property rights and physical space—to intangible ones centered on psychological freedom, decisional autonomy, and per- sonal identity as a more knowing society took root. Another transforma- tion was in the shifting sense of who was entitled to privacy’s refuge. The person imagined to be deserving of privacy, from the man of reputation in the 1890s to the “data subject” in the 1980s, did not stand still; the expan- sion of formal privacy rights and regulations across those de cades testified powerfully if insufficiently to the felt need for protection from those claiming a right to know. But perhaps the most unexpected development was the way in which the closely guarded secrets of the Victorian era moved out into the open after the 1960s, whether in po liti cal, psycholog- ical, or pop- cultural form. Although never completely or fi nally, an older fear of exposure gave way to an embrace of disclosure, an age of discretion supplanted by an age of self- broadcasting. The yearning for recognition and authenticity that would take hold in many corners of American so- ciety in the 1970s confounds conventional narratives of privacy’s twentieth- century career. It too is tightly bound to the career of the known citizen.

Although this book takes a broad view of privacy’s history, its omissions may surprise. Today’s commentators on privacy tend to gravitate to the most brazen instances of overreach and invasion, whether illegal federal wiretaps or covert social media profiling. My own search for bearings in more than a century of privacy talk has led me down a dif fer ent path, alert to the manifold ways that Americans have managed their relation- ship to those who would know them. This has led me to spend far more time thinking about Social Security numbers, subliminal advertising, and public rest rooms than I could have anticipated when I set out to write about privacy. The Known Citizen is, as a consequence, neither a history of the surveillance society nor of the national security state, two of the most

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common frameworks for thinking about privacy in the early twenty- first century (for perhaps obvious reasons).26 Without a doubt, surveillance tech- nologies and the demands of national security ratcheted up privacy talk in the twentieth century, as did innovations in commercial data mining at the turn of the twenty- first. But it is also the case that these developments—if and when Americans became aware of them— intersected with and ampli- fied public debates that were already well under way. For this reason, Face- book surveillance and malware, as well as the headline- grabbing episodes of the Cold War and the War on Terror, show up here as bit players rather than the main event.

By trailing the known citizen, this book foregrounds less expected places where privacy talk percolated in modern Amer i ca: scientific laboratories and family living rooms, marketing agencies and welfare bureaus, social movements and therapeutic encounters. Those conversations, I contend, were as critical to public debates over privacy as were revelations of state break-ins and massive data breaches. Scandals may have provided a clear focus for American privacy talk, but daily negotiations supplied the sensi- bility. Well- publicized privacy violations in this way obscure what might best be described as an ongoing skirmish over the demands of the modern social order and its many claims on the person. The encroachments of a knowing society—in the form of telephone lines or psychological exams, public rec- ords or credit cards— were often most keenly felt in the intimate rounds of personal life.

The potential rewards of such a society were evident too, with many people willing to live more openly by embracing new modes of exposure and disclosure. The domains of the house hold, the bureaucratic agency, and the talk show yield plentiful stories of those who si mul ta neously re- sisted and craved being known, who both pursued and dispensed with privacy. Writers focused on surveillance often neglect this crucial fact: that concerns about intrusion have often been accompanied by a desire for vis- ibility. Citizens, indeed, have often sought to be better known by their state and society— whether in the name of security, con ve nience, or social recog- nition. If Americans were in the twentieth century increasingly sensitive to infringements on their privacy, they were also aware that the way they lived often depended on such invasions. That, in a nutshell, was the dilemma of a knowing society.

The history offered here also makes abundantly clear that the impetus for privacy claims in American society— stretching all the way back to the

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nineteenth century— has as often been the actions of private entities as those of the central government.27 The notion that privacy talk in the United States has been animated primarily by governmental power is a byproduct of fo- cusing on the legal right to privacy, generally framed as a defense against state action. Although aggressive journalists and photog raphers were a cata- lyst for modern American privacy arguments, it has been all too easy to ne- glect the central role of nonstate actors, whether corporations or private citi- zens themselves, in ushering in a modern sense of privacy’s precariousness. The government could be both guarantor and violator of individual privacy. So too could the many other institutions of social life: workplaces, laborato- ries, schools, and homes.

Recent commentators often envision a giant ledger where privacy is slip- ping ever more swiftly into the deficit column. Yet we miss something impor tant if we insist, as many do, that it has been on a steady and precipi- tous decline. Privacy in the modern United States has been less a thing with definite contents than a seedbed for social thought, a tool for navi- gating an increasingly knowing society. Recurring debates about intimacy and intrusion across the last century are a product of this society’s dynamic, unavoidable tensions. This history explains why securing the boundary be- tween one’s private affairs and one’s public identity has become such a rou- tine, and yet urgent, task of modern life. A focus on the predicament of the known citizen— perhaps even more pressing today than it was when Auden wrote— will, I hope, help us better grasp privacy’s significance for con- temporary U.S. culture, politics, and law.

As such, this book allows us to listen in on a vital strand of social thought in the twentieth- century United States. Its goal is not to decry but to explore the multifarious forms of publicity, exposure, and disclosure that modern Americans have lived with either by choice or necessity. It acknowledges that individuals’ search for privacy has always been complicated by their quest for recognition. It takes up the themes of secrecy and surveillance, recording and revelation, identity and identification that together constitute the danger but also the appeal of being known. It does its best to reckon with the knowledge prob lems at the heart of modern privacy— and of modern citizenship too.

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On the cusp of the twentieth century, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had hoped to rein in an aggressive media so as to sequester personal matters and images from general view, except in that limited band of cases that concerned “public men.” This was the only way, they argued, to protect the “inviolate personality” from newly intrusive forces in American society. Many in the de cades that followed made similar claims for the necessity of privacy and of privacy rights in a demo cratic society. These claims accompanied anxious discussions of identification systems and psycholog- ical testing, reproductive decision making and welfare administration, electronic eavesdropping and computerized dossiers.

At the century’s end, however, a reversal appeared to be at hand. Some- thing that commentators began to call “confessional culture” seemed to impel the very public airing of highly personal stories and what in another day would have been tightly concealed secrets.1 Unlike the forced disclo- sures of gay public figures or the calculated comments of politicians, these were voluntary utterances, willingly offered up. They did not carry an ob- vious public message or po liti cal intent. These confessions, instead, spoke to the heightened value of personal expression of all kinds. Americans, it seems, were actively seeking out new venues for self- revelation. As they did, shame in disclosing private matters seemed to tilt decisively toward shame in concealing who one really was.

The rise of a much- decried “confessional culture” appears at first glance like a fundamental discontinuity from the rights- oriented privacy talk of

8

Stories of One’s Self

Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?

— b r o c k c l a r k e , An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, 2007

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 8 . H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2022 9:59 AM via UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES AN: 1913810 ; Sarah E. Igo.; The Known Citizen : A History of Privacy in Modern America Account: s3432366.main.ehost

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the 1960s, with its emphasis on protecting citizens from the gaze of others. How was it that some individuals had come to relish the prospect of making their own lives, not to mention the lives of others, an open book? To a re- markable degree, privacy discussions by the 1990s concerned not just the intrusions of authorities into private life but also the extrusion of private matters into public places. The flip side of the relentless exposure of promi- nent figures— President Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades the most sensational example— was ordinary citizens’ own quest for publicity: their voluntary divulgences of matters ranging from child abuse to drug addiction in con- fessional talk shows, tell- all memoirs, and real ity tele vi sion. What if we have met the privacy invaders, some critics implored, and they are us?

So it was that at the end of the twentieth century, journalists, corpora- tions, and state authorities were joined by yet another set of actors seeming to imperil Americans’ privacy: willing exhibitionists, happy to dispense with the concept altogether as they foisted intimate details of their per- sonal lives on strangers. Their unceasing urge to divulge provoked phi los- o phers and social critics to issue dramatic pronouncements: that privacy was dead or dying or that “the destruction of privacy is the great collective proj ect of our time.”2 The recent arrival of self- broadcasting genres such as blogging and social networking has only cemented the analy sis. Some legal scholars would even pivot from devising ways to curb privacy intru- sions to calling for laws that would restrain citizens from giving their pri- vacy away. Arguing that privacy is both “so impor tant and so neglected in con temporary life,” Anita Allen for example envisioned “a rescue mission that includes enacting paternalistic privacy laws for the benefit of uneager beneficiaries.” The state of public culture was such that there was perhaps a need and a place for “coercing privacy.”3

What commentators often neglected to take into account was the broader context in which late twentieth- century Americans were moved to “confess,” as well as the way new modes of disclosure grew out of a longer dialogue about privacy in the United States. Americans gleaned impor tant lessons from this history, both the failure of po liti cal rights to protect individuals from exposure and the inevitability of classification by opaque bureaucratic operations. Especially critical was the simultaneous establishment of privacy rights and the recognition of their inadequacy in solving the prob lem of privacy in a “surveillance society.” 4 Depending on how you looked at it, the demo cratic citizen was either being extended or dissolved by the technologically advanced, mass- mediated, and data-

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hungry world he or she inhabited. In a society that knew so much, where might “zones of privacy” or autonomy be found? The search for an answer pushed ideas about personal privacy in surprising directions. Whereas privacy had once been conceived as a retreat from public view, in some domains it was being rethought as a matter of very public self- definition.

Making Oneself Known The confessional genre, whether in its religious or secular guise, was hardly new in the 1990s. Both St. Augustine at the turn of the fifth century and Jean- Jacques Rousseau in the eigh teenth century penned what they called “Confessions.” Confessional speech has long served in Western culture as a way for individuals to establish their “inner truth.”5 But when surveying that time- honored tradition in 2000, literary scholar Peter Brooks suggested that this method of laying the self bare “to know oneself and to make one- self known” had gotten seriously out of hand. “In a con temporary culture that celebrates the therapeutic value of getting it all out in public,” he la- mented, “confession has become nearly banal.” Citing tele vi sion talk shows in par tic u lar, full of “ people speaking confessionally about their own lives in ways unthinkable to earlier generations,” Brooks condemned “a gener- alized transparency, in which each of us is fully open to all others without dissimulation.” That impulse was tyrannical, “a policing of the very pri- vacy that selfhood requires.” 6

Brooks was not the only critic to bewail the way a discipline that had been part of Roman Catholic practice for centuries— a “secret transaction carried out in the closed space of the curtained and grilled confessional box” set apart from the “usual confines and censorships” of daily life— had become so very undisciplined.7 A host of observers concluded in the 1990s that confession had come to define American public life. Volubility about one’s faults and shames, to anyone who would listen, had become standard practice. Whether celebrated or lamented, the trend was clear: in all kinds of venues, people sought the sympathy (or attention) of others for acts that they had previously kept quiet. That American culture had gone “confes- sional” was so obvious that books on the topic did not even feel the need to prove the point.8 Examples were not hard to come by. Televised talk shows, pioneered by Phil Donahue in 1967, took on a more spectacular form in the de cades that followed, with guests spilling ever more painful and provocative stories.9 Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the same period energized evangelical Christians to merge their po liti cal and religious

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activities, making narratives of weakness and salvation a regular feature of national politics.10 Meanwhile, twelve- step groups such as Alco- holics Anonymous ushered personal testimonies into Americans’ public vocabulary.11

The biggest domestic po liti cal story of the 1990s for many confirmed the trend. The Clinton impeachment was proof positive of a society bent on exposing secrets. But for some observers the imbroglio was less significant for how ruthlessly the scandal was investigated than for the manner in which the president and his accuser told their stories. In an age when public apologies for national sins had become commonplace, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky alike seemed rather too ready to talk in a register of recovery and redemption.12 The careful parsing of the president’s multiple “confessions” by rhetoricians and reporters showed how finely tuned such public acts had become.13 Some viewed the president, like the nation he led, as a product of a confessional culture pure and simple. “In Bill Clin- ton’s Amer i ca,” wrote one scholar, “the intersection of Protestant practice, therapeutic technique, and talk- show ethos was complete.”14 Clinton “combined legal evasion with the repentant fervor of the sinner,” argued another, while also “displaying signs that he wished to be treated as a re- covering addict.” Had the president “not been under the shadow of the perjury charge,” this writer mused, “one suspects he would happily have appeared on a talk show to tell all, to seek consolation in the community of fellow- sinners.”15

For critics, this kind of self- exposure was harmful in two distinct ways. First, unseemly disclosure of personal matters affronted individual sensi- bilities as well as public decency. One person’s voluntary expression, that is, could be another’s violation. Similar defenses of propriety and “community standards” had accompanied debates over privacy for at least a century. The question of the “unwilling audience” and a claim on something like a collective right to privacy had surfaced in outcries in the 1960s over sexually explicit materials sent through the mail, for example.16 “Crossing a border to impose upon the person,” privacy scholars would note, could be as much an infringement of privacy as was deliberate prying into one’s af- fairs. Telephone and mail solicitations, neon signs, public nudity, loud music, or the sharing of inappropriate information were perhaps not first- order pri- vacy intrusions.17 But to be assaulted by others’ excessive revelations—to be “constantly exposed to other people’s life stories . . . their breakups, the health of their portfolios, their psychotherapeutic pro gress, their arguments

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with their bosses or boyfriends or parents,” as one critic described Amer- ican society in the age of the cell phone— could impinge on one’s sense of solitude and peace of mind as surely as could a breach of one’s personal space.18

The second and perhaps greater prob lem was what some going back to the 1960s called “self- invasions of privacy.”19 Individuals who revealed themselves too readily were thought to do themselves damage by failing to recognize the impor tant distinction between personal and public life. In this analy sis, the outflow of personal stories in the 1990s signified a char- acter prob lem: a troubling borderlessness between intimate thoughts and deeds, on the one hand, and their recounting, on the other. To some, Amer- icans’ very capacity for inwardness and introspection— what Peter Brooks described as the “privacy that selfhood requires”— appeared in jeopardy.20 Worry about citizens’ willingness to cede their privacy was thus the uneasy companion to concern about intrusions by power ful authorities. Bewailing the confessional impulse in American life, some commentators wondered if citizens had ever cared about privacy to begin with.

Observers had in fact periodically fretted over Americans’ tendency to disclose more than they ought, as well as to seek to know more than they should. That had been one response to the arrival of postcards in the 1870s, and their apparent lack of concern with who might have access to private communications. In more sustained form, the complaint accompanied the rise of tabloid journalism. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis spied dan- gers to privacy not merely in the intrusions of photog raphers and reporters but also in a coarsened and trivialized public sphere awash in citizens’ peccadilloes and foibles. Believing that readers’ “demand” for gossip was stimulated by the press, they sought to staunch its effects on public mo- rality. Warren and Brandeis in 1890 targeted the media, but they sensed the lure of self- disclosure for the discloser and the audience alike.

The same recognition underlay the success of True Story Magazine, a publication created by physical culture enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden in 1919 that circulated the “au then tic secrets” of ordinary Americans. A cor- nerstone of the emerging “confession industry,” it was soon plagued by imi- tators.21 Debates over how much revelation was too much— whether of one’s body, biography, emotions, or secrets— were provoked not just by the press and publishers but also by new styles of public comportment at urban dance halls and other mass amusement sites of the early twentieth century, by the social uses of the telephone in the 1920s, by the vogue of psychoanalysis

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in the 1940s, by the emergence of confessional poetry in the Cold War era, and by the counterculture’s embrace of more casual modes of self- expression in the 1970s.22 Each of these developments in its turn seemed to threaten established conventions of propriety, violating the border between public and private affairs. The premium on personal disclosure in the twentieth century thus had deep roots. Why then, did American culture suddenly appear to “go confessional” only in its final de cades?

A number of trends, some long in the making, conspired to make pri- vate matters newly prominent in public forums in the 1980s and 1990s. They were the work of both the po liti cal Left and Right and both religious and secular culture. The growing presence of evangelical Protestantism in the postwar United States was one impor tant source. Whereas the modern Catholic tradition of confessing one’s sins was an expressly private act, public testaments of conversion and religious revivals had been integral aspects of Protestant practice in Amer i ca from the beginning.23 In the twentieth century the confessional form, wherein individuals stood before a congregation to voice their transgressions, would gain a wider audience.

Radio ministry starting in the 1920s and its televised counterpart by the 1950s transmitted the practice of confession into American hearts and homes, and preachers with an extensive national following like Oral Roberts and Billy Graham pop u lar ized it. Graham’s televised “crusades” to bring sinners redemption were major cultural events, with regular pro- gramming often canceled to cover them— drawing audiences rivaling those for other media spectacles such as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. After 1960, when federal restrictions on religious programming changed, “confession- oriented programming became the most vis i ble, the most aggressive, the most familiar of all religious broadcasts.” The practice of public testifying, Susan Wise Bauer notes, “moved from church to airwaves, and then, sideways, from sacred airwaves to secular programming.”24 During the 1980s, a surge of televangelists, led by figures like the husband- and- wife team of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, prodded guests “to reveal more and more about their private lives, their sins and shortcomings” in order to engage and hold their broad tele vi sion audiences as much as to convert them.25

Secular confessions can be traced to the strength and spread of a thera- peutic approach to personal prob lems that had expanded from its postwar purchase to infiltrate every cranny of U.S. culture. A new vocabulary of the self moved into po liti cal discourse in the second half of the twentieth

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century, such that mental fitness, au then tic emotion, and self- interrogation all came to matter in public life.26 Con temporary commentators pointed to the grip of Freudian theory, which held that discovering— and talking about— the hidden truths of one’s personal history, especially of one’s child- hood, held the key to emotional well- being and psychic health.27 The rapid growth in those seeking counseling in the postwar United States, therapists’ emphasis on the hard work of self- knowledge, and radio’s and tele vi sion’s amenability to the therapeutic mode all played a part in building a psychological society. What seemed most distinctive in its later twentieth- century manifestation was the way therapy seemed to flow out- ward, such that highly personal narratives of suffering and healing infused public culture.28

In the later 1970s, the most remarked-on instance of this impulse to “open up” was the emergence of group therapy and “ human potential” or encounter groups, in which individuals loosened their inhibitions as part of their quest for personal transformation.29 Openness and directness were the currency of this movement, which encouraged people to find self- acceptance by sharing their deepest strug gles within a safe circle of others.30 To doubters, the point was to “invite people to collaborate in their own exposure— and frequently their humiliation as well.”31 Much like tele- vi sion viewers’ attachment to the Louds, a critic argued in the Wall Street Journal, such practices made evident that “the inner self is no longer sac- rosanct and that the intimate lives of strangers constitute meaningful emo- tional experiences for those to whom they are revealed.” Reporting from California’s Esalen Institute, where people came “precisely for the purpose of making public their private selves, of disclosing to total strangers their covert fantasies, their angers, their delights,” she believed that “this exer- cise in total undress” revealed that privacy had “become a negative value, the unmistakable opponent of the ‘openness’ that is here equated with the realization of human potential.”32

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the most popu lar site for such con- fessions, however, was surely the televised talk shows that were taking over the airwaves. TV hosts like Phil Donahue acted in the guise of counselors extracting secrets from tele vi sion guests so as to banish those secrets’ power over their holders. Beginning in 1986, the Chicago- based Oprah Winfrey fused the links among confessional discourse, tele vi sion, and sales as did no other media personality, such that the televised talk show became iden- tified first and foremost as a “vehicle of personal transformation.”33 Guests

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on the Oprah Winfrey Show, speculates one scholar, appeared on the program precisely “ because of their belief in the curative potential of TV talk, in the form of public confession.”34 The host herself, who described the show as “a ministry,” would eventually brand its distinctive blend of uplift, self- help, “inner revolution,” and consumerism as “Change Your Life TV.”35

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, themselves inflected by the psychological currents of the age, were yet another factor propelling personal stories into public fora.36 The re orientation of politics around identity categories and toward questions of damage and status, theorists have speculated, shifted the way publics in postindustrial democracies operated.37 In the new “life politics” of late modernity, truth- telling in the form of personal narratives was a means of critiquing what many saw as the crippling falsehoods of American society.38 Confessing was understood as an act not solely of individual redemption but also of social politics and protest, most notably in feminist consciousness- raising groups. For this reason, privacy claims had—in both the women’s and gay liberation movement— been subject to considerable suspicion. In some arenas, the claim looked like a cover for exploitation, rendering some voices and sub- jects unknowable.

By the 1990s, the longer- term consequences of these developments were becoming evident. The quest for authenticity in relationships and the post- 1960s critique of authority were still palpable forces in American life, but they now often appeared decoupled from an explicit collective politics. For example, the once po liti cally motivated “coming- out moment” for gay Americans served by the 1980s and 1990s a largely subjective purpose linked to “feelings of self- worth and self- fulfillment,” notes historian Heather Murray. As one advisor on the practice urged in 1990, coming out was “the first step in liberating yourself to be a whole, complete, and power ful adult— the authority figure in your own life.”39 Emotional satis- faction and closure, forms of personal rather than social transformation, were the new rewards of revelation. Although some gay Americans, reflecting on their pre- Stonewall days, missed the sense of belonging to a hidden subculture, more and more seemed to feel the tug of confession, disclosing their true identities to friends and family members to foster genuine bonds.40 As gay citizens made the transition from “secret to known, even formalized, selves,” writes Murray, gay expressive culture became

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marked by autobiographical accountings and explanations. The personal was, above all, to be “named and talked about.” 41

Yet only the fact that personal disclosures still carried a po liti cal charge, and still held the power to disrupt, can fully explain what made “confes- sion” both so resonant and so reviled in the late twentieth century. The owner ship of one’s story and the desire to tell it were often trivialized. But the amount of attention such narratives captured in American po liti cal culture suggests that the impulse to reveal oneself in talk, on tele vi sion, in print, or online was not in fact trivial. When critics denounced a topsy- turvy world in which the most private of matters received the most public of vettings or argued that some of the most impor tant privacy invasions of the age were self- inflicted, they implied a deficiency in both public cul- ture and private life. What they responded to was nothing so simple as an urge to share. Confessional culture, 1990s style, had many taproots: the media forms and celebrity culture that made self- publicity so alluring, the critique of secrets that was transforming po liti cal culture, and the incit- ements to authenticity and redemption emanating in equal mea sure from the couch and congregation. But it found ground as well in Americans’ sense that they lived, inescapably, in a society that knew too much about them already.

Bearing and Baring All In 1974, the cameras having decamped, the controversy over An American Family subsiding, and the Louds moving on to life beyond the show, the family’s matriarch published her autobiography. Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story relied “entirely on the notoriety of the tele vi sion show, and Pat Loud’s subsequent celebrity, as its raison d’être.” 42 The book is indeed only con- ceivable in the wake of the broadcast, Pat’s story notable because her pri- vacy had already been breached, her life already exposed. In its pages she mused wryly about the effects of that publicity: “Most people become fa- mous for a reason. They develop a vaccine, or cross the ocean on a raft, or star in a movie, or embezzle a lot of money or . . . or . . . or. But we, the Louds, Pat, Bill, and our five kids, managed to get famous without doing a thing except giving our permission for PBS to follow us around with a camera for a while—to lend our lives for seven months to the making of An American Family. And it seems that if you’re on TV, you’re famous, and free game in a weird way, no matter what you’re on TV for.” 43

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Pat Loud, along with the rest of her brood, had of course been roundly criticized for their part in exposing themselves. Relying on a set of psycho- logical experts, Time magazine suggested that the Louds were “symptom- atic of a cultural ‘compulsion to confess’ ” and that parading their trou bles in the mass media was just another species of therapy.44 Likewise, a writer for the New York Times opined that the Louds were just like other, lesser- known people trying to “solve personal prob lems in public,” flocking, for instance, to encounter groups in an attempt to fix what ailed them.45 As Pat surely knew, her decision to surrender still more of her secrets in print would draw similar censure. But it was 1974, and she had already allowed her family to come apart on public tele vi sion before millions. So, “since we’re letting it all hang out” as she put it, Pat detailed— often with win- ning humor— her upbringing, her marriage in 1950, her love for her children but also her loneliness in being a house wife, her discovery of her husband’s infidelity (“in ’66 the whole thing blew up”), the course of Bill’s affairs (and her own, offered without much elaboration, but the mere fact of them a bold admission), her resulting depression and sessions with a psychiatrist, her visits to lawyers to initiate divorce proceedings and then to halt them, and her postdivorce dating life.46 In doing so, the woman who inadvertently became one of tele vi sion’s first real ity stars placed herself on the leading edge of yet another cultural phenomenon.

Pat Loud’s autobiography, even if it now seems rather chaste, is a recog- nizable contribution to a new breed of memoir—or, at least, a new em- phasis within memoir writing on offering up one’s most closely held secrets.47 In the pages of Pat Loud, we can glimpse the lineaments of a genre that would overtake the publishing market in the final de cade of the twentieth century.48 Confessional memoirs— termed “redemption mem- oirs” by one critic, and “traumatic memoirs” by another— were crafted from the author’s intimate pains and triumphs.49 Culturally, they were of a piece with other forms of popu lar revelation, the talk show as well as the “coming out” moment. These highly personal narratives chronicled distress, damage, and abuse (sometimes self- inflicted) and typically also how such hardships were overcome.

The ascent of the confessional memoir told a bigger story too, shining a light on the peculiar status of privacy at the century’s end. It arrived, after all, in a period when many citizens took for granted that they lived under the watchful eye of both state and society. Not just instant celebrities like Pat Loud but also ordinary Americans in the 1970s came to understand

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their lives as recorded for the benefit of strangers. Any number of agen- cies, known and unknown, gathered and housed pieces of their history in databases and files— whether to advance them credit and insurance, rec ord educational achievement, or track health and retirement benefits. It cannot be a coincidence that some individuals began displaying their own lives very publicly in these same years. Meant not to pin down identity but to illuminate it, the confessional memoir was nevertheless bound up with these trends. Memoirists exposed themselves, but on their own terms. They put revelation in the ser vice not of regulation but of self- realization.

The personal narratives that would soon fill publishing houses and bookstores stood apart from older forms of self- narration like diary keeping, usually meant for the author alone rather than an audience of strangers. They also differed from standard autobiography. Autobiographical writing is, one scholar writes, “always a gesture toward publicity, displaying before an impersonal public an individual’s interpretation of experience.”50 In- deed, public figures, from the early American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin to the African American intellectual and leader of Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington, and from the blind teacher Helen Keller to the immigrant novelist Mary Antin, had in the past shared their histo- ries in order to inspire and instruct. From the early nineteenth century on, publishing one’s life story was a familiar genre for lesser- known narrators too, whose personal experiences generated curiosity and sometimes a profit in a thriving print culture; beggars, criminals, captives, soldiers, and fugi- tives all peddled their stories.51 The slave narrative became a genre unto itself in the same era. There the telling of a life served larger po liti cal ends, mobilizing abolitionist sympathies and often— reversing the autobiograph- ical tradition of famous men— propelling a hitherto unknown writer onto a public platform.52

Whether authored by little- or well- known Americans, these works stressed public actions and events and the biographical incidents, character traits, or personal aspirations that shaped them. They did not typically hinge on divulging intimate secrets. On the contrary, most steered clear of the author’s “private” life. Frederick Douglass included only cursory discussions of his childhood in slavery before he set out into the public world. And even in a careful reading of Up from Slavery (1901), one could miss that Booker  T. Washington was married three times and fathered three children. Late twentieth- century memoirs, by contrast, made such matters— and far more sensitive ones— their soul and substance. In the

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pro cess, the very definition of what constituted a memoir shifted. The term, notes critic Ben Yagoda, had once been reserved for reminiscences about notable persons, with the author merely a character and observer. The new- style memoir was instead “resolutely focused on the self.”53

In hers, Pat Loud recorded for public consumption aspects of her biography— love and sex, depression and counseling—to which not even her viewing audience had been privy. Once again, reviewers were not par- ticularly kind. To some, Pat’s life story appeared flimsy and potted, mod- eled on well- worn commercial formulas. The Washington Post called it “a composite of those flashy best- sellers the public buys in carload lots and the more cultivated reviewers regularly denounce as libels on American life.”54 Others spied more profound cultural developments at work. Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times, although he judged Pat intelligent and articulate, read the autobiography as the product of an age in which “self- exposure” was the rage, with Americans confusing “the two- dimensional il- lusion for the three- dimensional real ity.” Putting her book in the com pany of con temporary phenomena such as nude streaking and theatrical poli- tics, he described Pat as angry and hurt by her experience before the camera, yet “strangely elated by the instant celebrity.” It was a hallmark of the times, Kirsch believed, that “seeing ourselves exposed is a way of estab- lishing our identities.”55

Pat Loud’s memoir may indeed have been an act of identity making. She did not, however, frame her memoir in those terms. Pat made clear instead that a central reason for writing the book was to correct “the impressions the tele vi sion camera left.”56 No longer the object of a film and at the mercy of a director’s gaze, Pat leveraged celebrity in order to exercise some control over the story of her life. She also needed the money. Her divorce final and short on funds, Pat explained that she had broken her vow of “purity of motive” regarding the tele vi sion series and was de- termined to capitalize in any way pos si ble on her newfound— but she recognized, temporary— notoriety. “We are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame brought us by the series,” Pat admitted. The family had even auctioned off “a weekend with the Louds” for the local public TV channel (“a nice- sounding couple who got us for $210 is coming to stay,” she remarked).57 The memoir was surely part of that campaign.58

Already, however, there were “fewer and fewer talk shows. It won’t be long before they’re saying, Pat who?”59 This was less a lament—as her

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critics would have it— than a pragmatic reckoning about how much more she might eke out of her fame. In fact, as time passed, Pat became the most reticent of all the Louds regarding An American Family.60 In 1982, she declined to talk about the series to a reporter, saying, “I just don’t want any of that.” 61 Even as she unburdened her sex life in the 1974 autobiography, Pat fantasized about regaining her privacy. Its final chapter charts her moving away from a town that knew too much about her to New York City, where “nobody knows anybody else” and “you have privacy, you can get lost in the crowds.” 62 Pat Loud claimed, anyway, to want an “all private” existence, where “nobody knows what we’re doing.” 63 Her desire for privacy, and specifically for a place where she could be unknown, challenges easy assumptions about the inducements and aftereffects of a publicized life.

For all that, there was something undeniably transformative for Pat Loud in choosing to open up her own life and that of her family in the early 1970s. This much is evident in her brief musings on women’s liberation in her memoir and even in its subtitle. Hers was, after all, “a woman’s story,” and the press coverage of the book focused on its most au courant as- pects: “single motherhood, divorce, sexual liberation, and the women’s movement.” 64 Underwriting the late twentieth- century memoir was the legacy of feminism and its insight that personal harms were profoundly enmeshed in power relations— requiring painful excavation and publicity to exorcise. Although Pat claimed she felt “too old” to be part of the women’s liberation movement, she grasped the affinities between her life and the cause. Sending tentative feelers out to the revolution in gender roles, she understood that letting loose her marital woes, treating them as neither shameful nor secret, entailed seeing them as something more than mere individual injury or failure. In this way, her autobiography—no matter the harsh reviews— partook of a broader turn to personal narrative as a route to analyzing one’s own social formation. If this meant dispensing with old strictures regarding talking about personal matters, so be it.

In the 1970s, even Betty Ford didn’t say all that was on her mind or re- veal every thing about herself. In a memoir published in 1978, The Times of My Life, she discussed topics ranging from her physical attraction to her husband to prob lems with her prosthetic breast.65 The cultural proscrip- tions on talking about bodily, sexual, and medical matters were clearly loosening. But Ford made no reference to a facet of her biography that was for her still more private as well as shameful— her addiction to painkillers and alcohol— even though suspicions had been raised on this score during

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her time in the White House.66 Only years later would she append a chapter dealing with her substance abuse. It was not until 1987, and the writing of a second memoir, titled Betty: A Glad Awakening, that she would tell this story in full.67 In the meantime, the former First Lady had founded a treat- ment fa cil i ty, the Betty Ford Center, and become the most vis i ble spokes- person in the nation on the prob lems of substance abuse and addiction.68 Reflecting on the evolving shape of her autobiography, she explained, “The first book was on the outside— about people, places, and things. This book came very much from the inside.” 69

In this decade- long journey from relating her “outer” story to resolving to tell her “inner” one, Ford traced a path that others would follow. By the late 1980s, others too were beginning to divulge the darkest, most painful details of their lives in print. The most thorough scholar of the memoir, Ben Yagoda, finds that up until the late 1960s, nearly all works in that category presented their subjects in a positive light. While a handful of personal narratives on mental illness and addiction did appear in the early postwar de cades, they were almost always fictionalized or written under pseudonyms.70 Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar of 1963, published under the name of Victoria Lucas, was a case in point.

However, “like many other things . . . autobiography broke loose in the middle and late 1960s.” A trickle of wrenching firsthand accounts, named and narrated as such, began to appear. African American memoirists were among the first to offer their searing personal histories to the reading public.71 Dick Gregory and Malcolm X, Anne Moody and Maya Angelou, all mined the “trauma of their pasts” in order to bear witness to the harms of the American racial order.72 Holocaust memoirists followed suit, of- fering testimony about and finding a reading audience for lives marked by tragedy and sometimes transcendence.73 The floodgates then opened to a stream of memoirs by “minor celebrities” in the mid- to late 1970s. These typically focused less on social or po liti cal traumas than domestic ones.74 The best known, Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (1978), offered a no- holds- barred portrait of the actress Joan Crawford from the perspective of her estranged daughter in the same year that Betty Ford published The Times of My Life.

Mining the damaging dramas of personal and family life would become the memoir’s métier. Across the next de cade or so, the genre would take on its distinctive con temporary shape. By the 1990s, the ranks of memoir- ists had increased far beyond the “minor celebrities” of the 1970s. And prior

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levels of frankness would be surpassed, with books pouring out on child- hood abuse, mental illness, family dysfunction, sex addiction, physical dis- figurement, grief, alcoholism, drug abuse, and incest.75 Critics turned to William Styron’s 1990 “unexpected best seller” and memoir of depression, Darkness Vis i ble, as one origin point for what they labeled the “memoir boom.”76 In it, Styron, a successful author, divulged the self- loathing, anx- iety, confusion, and dread that took hold of him suddenly at age 60. He explained his decision to write about his crippling depression as a desire to overcome public ignorance of the illness. “My need to communi- cate,” he reflected, “overrode the risks of self- exposure.”77 While it is impossible to cata log all the other motives that led memoirists to dissect their own lives for the reading public, a quest for fame, visibility, and more book contracts surely played a large role, as critics suspected. But a thera- peutic quest for “closure,” an interest in unmasking power in family and sexual relationships, and— less noticed at the time— a desire to renarrate an already- told life were also recurring themes.

Changes in the commercial publishing industry were part of the expla- nation for the warm reception of such narratives. With tele vi sion coverage one of the best ways to boost sales, the promotion of books was increas- ingly keyed to talk shows— themselves a leading factor in fostering a cul- ture of self- revelation by placing “ordinary people and their prob lems in the spotlight.”78 Media scholar Joshua Gamson writes that the promotion of “the guest- who- is- expert- in- her- own- life” was “indebted to a talk show ideology and format in which emotional experience is the most respected real ity” and in which “getting people to talk revealingly and personally” was the primary draw for the audience.79 Indeed, the publishing industry rule- of- thumb was that the best way for a book to get noticed was through the hook of “a dramatic or unusual personal story.” As one editor instructed Vanity Fair readers as to why memoir trumped fiction in the marketplace, “You can send the ‘I’ out on tour.”80 Early TV hosts like Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Montel Williams, as surely as Oprah Winfrey’s book club, were behind the flurry of memoirs by the 1990s. The commodi- fication and salability of personal suffering— the evident financial, rather than simply psychological, rewards of unburdening— also account for some of the sharp criticism directed at the genre.

But a hunger for realness and authenticity in print drove the memoir boom as well. The new confessional narratives were much like documen- taries in their piercing of facades and their search for raw truths.81 They

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built on the new esteem for personal transparency. The cofounder of Random House estimated that when he entered the publishing business in the 1920s, fiction had outsold nonfiction by four to one. By the late twen- tieth century, he observed, “that ratio is absolutely reversed.”82 In 2000 a scholar supplied more evidence for the appeal of the real. “Although it is unclear whether the market has led or followed,” she observed, “market demand currently encourages marketing practices such as subtitling an author’s first book ‘a memoir’ when in previous years it might have been classified as fiction.”83 What was abundantly obvious was that many were finding their voices by confessing. “The triumph of memoir is now estab- lished fact,” pronounced a critic in 1996, with even academics getting into the act by using personal pronouns in their scholarly writing and penning “moi criticism.”84 Americans had clearly, and volubly, plunged into “the Age of Memoir.”85 The 1990s would be both known and scorned as “the de- cade of revelation.”86

In this era, writes Ben Yagoda, there was “none of the coyness or veiling strategies” that had marked earlier memoirists’ treatment of their most pri- vate moments. Instead, “authors faced the camera straight on and told the truth— the more unsettling, shocking, or horrifying the truth, it sometimes seemed, the better.”87 Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss, a 1997 memoir about her four- year- long sexual relationship with her own father, perhaps pushed the form the furthest.88 A writer for Amazon . com, noting that Americans now lived in a world awash in “ordinary citizens selling their personal traumas,” nevertheless strug gled to summon up a list of topics as shocking as the one Harrison had written about: “ Mothers Who Sleep with Their Daughters’ Boyfriends; Men Who Wear Their Girlfriends’ Clothes; People Whose Families Have Been Murdered before Their Eyes.” Clearly the culture had reached the point where “no subject is too salacious or too shameful for public consumption.”89 Responding to Har- rison’s memoir, Entertainment Weekly asked, “Just because a writer can speak the unspeakable, does that mean that she should?” This same writer reflected on how jolting the book’s contents had been for reviewers, The Washington Post blasting The Kiss as “slimy, repellent, meretricious, cyn- ical,” and a critic for the Wall Street Journal resorting to a phrase of her grand mother’s, urging the author to “hush up.”90

Harrison responded to readers’ and critics’ revulsion with some surprise: “I expected some people to be angry with me,” she wrote, “but I imagined their anger would be directed toward what I had done, not toward the

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choice to write about it.” Borrowing a meta phor from the gay liberation movement, she acknowledged the fact that “I’m held up as one of the writers who have changed the complexion of memoir as a form— that my example has helped open the collective closet” and that “a lot of skeletons have been dragged out into the light.” That act was welcomed by some readers but shunned by others. Of her harshest critics, Harrison later wrote, “I accepted their vehemence, because they mirrored my private responses to my history with my father. It frightened me and it made me angry. It disgusted me. It still does. It’s supposed to. It’s taboo.”91 But what Harri- son’s and other memoirs suggested was that the age of taboos was over, that there was nothing one could not broach in print.

This overstates the case, of course. There were limits to disclosure, even in an age of relentless confession. Women’s per sis tent silence surrounding their own abortions, although a constitutionally protected right, was a case in point. Whether the decision to keep one’s abortion “private” was an ex- ercise of privacy was, however, not so clear. As legal scholar Carol Sanger argues, that choice had more to do with secrecy, which was motivated not by the “right or preference to keep something to one’s self ” but by “fear of the consequences of revelation.”92 Some topics, even in the 1990s, still car- ried enough stigma to keep them largely out of public conversation. And certainly, most Americans did not make it a practice to reveal their greatest shames to utter strangers. Yet it was still striking that what Victorians would have considered to be their deepest, darkest secrets were now the common currency not just of psychotherapy but also of politics and popu lar culture.

E. L. Godkin had sworn in response to the inquisitive census of 1890 that “no man, and especially no woman, likes to tell a stranger about a se- cret disease or disability.”93 Memoirists a century later were proving him wrong in spades. Writers like Harrison told strangers about far more than disease or disability. They played brilliantly to a public eager to peel away the layers of a person and to enter into another’s inner life, perhaps es- pecially if something scandalous was involved. And they benefited handsomely—in fame, dollars, book contracts, a place on the talk show cir cuit— from the bargain they made to dispense with some of their se- crets. Detractors railed against the trend, art critic William Grimes pro- testing, “Is there not something to be said for the unexamined life?”94 Invariably, they pegged it to the waning fortunes of privacy in American society. Blaming the recovery movement, a therapeutic culture, a “strong

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interest in victimhood,” and, most worrisome of all, a shrinking “concern for privacy,” commentators lamented that “what used to be private is be- coming increasingly public.”95 Pronounced the New York Times Maga- zine, “We live in a time when the very notion of privacy, of a zone beyond the reach of public probing, has become an alien concept.”96 Many words were spilled in the attempt to understand why so many Americans were so freely baring their intimate lives. After all, these were typically not citizens who had been pressed to disclose their affairs by others— who had attracted the glare of the media, who were driven by po liti cal necessity, or who had been outed. Rather, they exposed themselves willingly and, critics sug- gested, indiscriminately.

Why was privacy, one of the most charismatic concepts of the postwar era, being disavowed with such abandon? In the debate over the tell- all memoir, few registered the ways that releasing personal details out into the stream of public culture could be a response to a sense of privacy already violated or diminished. Whether one was going to be known might be out of one’s hands. For some confessional writers, however, telling one’s story was perhaps the best means of controlling the way in which one would be known. Disclosure could be less about giving information away than about reining it back in— and publicness a path for reclaiming private life or at least one’s own version of it. Confessional memoirists thus discarded pri- vacy as traditionally understood even as they sometimes embraced the airing of one’s life as its best protection. Was writing The Kiss a supremely exhibitionist act or the only way to banish private shame? It was not always pos si ble to sort out whether a given memoir was an assertion of privacy or a rejection of it, a yearning to be surveilled or a flight from it. What does seem clear is that the confessional mode represented yet another episode in the story of how Americans have both fought to enlarge privacy and in- vade it— often at the very same time.

Correcting the Rec ord, Controlling the Narrative One of the most notable of the new crop of memoirs was, like William Styron’s, a work on mental illness. Written by Susanna Kaysen about her eighteen- month psychiatric confinement at McLean Hospital for border- line personality disorder when a teenager in the late 1960s, Girl, Interrupted (1993) was a runaway bestseller.97 It was also acknowledged by many critics to have “helped spark the memoir craze.”98 In its pages, using spare but eloquent prose, Kaysen offered an account of the daily rounds of mental

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illness. Of the young women on her ward, she observed, “In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity. All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.”99 It was an apt description of the new memoir form too.

Compared regularly to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar— also set at McLean and trained on psychiatry and female adolescence— Girl, Interrupted was, however, a product of its own time. Plath had written under a pseud- onym, careful to distance this difficult story from her public self. “The dif- ference of three de cades,” noted one critic, “is that Susanna Kaysen leads off her book with a facsimile of the first page of her own case rec ord folder at McLean Hospital.”100 Indeed, the very first things the reader learns about Kaysen are plucked directly from her confidential medical file: her name, her parents’ names and address, her date of birth, and her diagnosis of “borderline personality.” Rather than cloak such details, Kaysen fixed on them, interspersing her narrative with the administrative paperwork that recorded her experience of psychiatric confinement.101

In this re spect, Girl, Interrupted bears some resemblance to The File: A Personal History (1997), another memoir of this era, by En glish journalist Timothy Garton Ash. Ash had conducted research in Berlin in the late 1970s and would later learn that he had been closely scrutinized by the East German secret police during his time there. The memoir was his attempt to reconstruct this two- decades- old history in dialogue with the Stasi’s newly opened files. Ash compared the “subjective, allusive, emotional, self- description” of his own diary entries from that period with the “cold outward eye” of the Stasi’s observation reports.102 If less overtly, Kaysen’s was also an account of studying others’ surveillance of herself— nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and orderlies— and placing their interpretations alongside her own to unsettle the reader’s sense of whom to trust. Did the doctor who committed her to McLean while knowing so little about her do so after only twenty minutes (her recollection) or three hours (his documented account)? Should one rely on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s characterization of “Borderline Personality Disorder,” on which Kaysen spends a chapter, or the less technical and more en- gaging chapter that follows it, called “My Diagnosis,” for one’s under- standing of the author?103

As such, Kaysen posed in stark terms the question of the known citizen and its consequences. Just how well did the doctor, the hospital staff, and

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8.1. Emblematic of the new frankness of memoirs in the 1990s, Susanna Kaysen reprinted documents related to her psychiatric confinement at McLean Hospital.

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the broader society that committed Kaysen to a psychiatric hospital know her? On what grounds, indeed, was authoritative knowledge of a person built? And what kind of power and responsibility came with the knowing? Kaysen’s response was to offer a more intimate version of her history. Coming on the heels of the period in which Americans first contended with the “rec ord prison,” the shape of her memoir is noteworthy. Although it goes unmentioned in Girl, Interrupted, the author’s father was the economist Carl Kaysen, who had headed the federal task force on the storage of government statistics during the National Data Center contro- versy of the mid-1960s. The Kaysen Report addressed public concerns about the warehousing of citizens’ data, ultimately backing the proposal.104 In 1993, Susanna Kaysen resurrected her own ware housed data in order to tell a story that was a quarter- century old. She did so, at least in part, to challenge the file.

Girl, Interrupted is littered with reproductions of documents from Kaysen’s medical dossier. Her case rec ord folder, admission form, medi- cation and treatment chart, nurses’ reports, pro gress notes, and discharge form— not to mention interoffice memoranda about her and letters from her doctor offering assessments that she is ready to rejoin the outside world— tell their own spare story. Their inclusion invites questions about others’ categorizations and about the ways Kaysen herself was classified and filed: she titles one of her chapters “Stigmatography.” Kaysen’s closing words are a meditation on a Vermeer painting that haunts her, titled “Girl Interrupted at Her Music.” She writes, “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, what ever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”105 Implying that she had been “fixed”— not by an artist, but by the judgments in her medical file— and never fully seen, Kaysen in her memoir refocused the reader on the life beneath the paperwork.106 Disclosing the details of her institutionalization could be read less as a casting off of privacy than a reclaiming of those “snatched” months.

Indeed, Kaysen vigilantly sought to preserve her privacy after her memoir came out. As Time magazine reported, the fact that the memoirist wrote so openly about her strug gles with mental illness made her a “cult figure,” bringing her many letters, fans, and invitations to take part in public de- bates about, for example, antidepressants like Prozac.107 It was not, Kaysen

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claimed, a welcome publicity. Rather, many readers, drawn in by the transparency of the author’s prose, assumed a familiarity that made her uneasy. Kaysen objected to such overtures, saying, “I don’t believe I have any obligation to let people into my private life.” Time probed the seeming paradox: “as Kaysen becomes famous for writing a confessional book, it is her reticence that is most striking.”108

In an interview years later, in response to a second memoir concerned largely with her sex life, Kaysen again attempted to draw a line between herself and the person who appeared in the pages of her books. That dis- tinction confounded readers and critics alike. Kaysen wanted to have it both ways, they implied. The interviewer, insistent, asked, “Why did you withhold information about your family in Girl, Interrupted and why are you now unwilling to answer the natu ral follow-up questions about your current sexual functioning?” Kaysen replied, “ People assume that if you’re willing to say something about personal matters, you must say every thing. You’re a bad sport if you don’t participate in total self- revelation.” Although she included documents from a confidential file in her first memoir in part to signal her account’s transparent truth, and although she divulged highly personal details, psychological as well as physical, with an arresting direct- ness in the second, Kaysen rebuffed those who believed they were entitled to know her. These firsthand accounts were just as crafted and artificial as a novel, Kaysen asserted, not “a CAT scan of my emotional life.”109 Full disclosure had never been her interest or her point.

As many memoirists were coming to discover, however, their fans often demanded a more intimate relationship. Noting that “many readers feel they know me after they read one of my books,” author Cheryl Strayed ex- plained her need to set bound aries with audiences who took for granted that her “entire life is up for discussion.”110 People seemed to believe that “a memoirist has simply opened a vein and bled on the page,” writer Ayelet Waldman protested. “The reader thinks they know all of you . . . but you don’t owe your reader every thing, every story of your life, every ele ment of you. You owe your reader only what you want to reveal.”111 Critics of the memoir boom notwithstanding, these writers spoke to readers’ desire for more particulars, not fewer. And, whether sincere or savvy about their rea- sons for withholding personal details from their fans, these authors also indicated that there were limits to what even a confessional writer would reveal. For her part, frustrated by her fans’ per sis tence in wanting an un- mediated view and personal access, Kaysen would later claim to have given

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up on the memoir as a genre.112 Each of these public protestations about privacy from memoirists came on the heels of highly revealing accounts of their personal lives. The pattern underscored privacy’s ambiguous allure—do we want it or don’t we?— and perhaps even its commercial value. Would readers, one won ders, have been as interested in memoirists if they had truly revealed all, leaving nothing to the imagination, or to fill the pages of the next book?

Kaysen’s second memoir would test the bound aries of public discourse. It would also probe the limits of privacy law. Was there any protection for the lives a memoirist dragged into the spotlight along with her own? This was one of the thorny issues raised by Kaysen’s 2001 book, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, which was centrally concerned with ongoing, seem- ingly incurable vaginal pain and its effects on her sexual and emotional life. Critics classed it as “autopathography,” a term coined to describe the raft of new autobiographical work homing in on individual illness, both physical and mental.113 Like Kaysen’s first memoir, the book stood out for its brutal honesty and transgressive subject matter. Less favorably reviewed, however— Publishers’ Weekly billed it a “thin, disappointing chronicle of what happened when ‘something went wrong’ with her vagina”— some dismissed it, in a telling phrase of the period, as “TMI”: too much informa- tion.114 BookPage, for example, noted that Kaysen was “being criticized for  taking autobiography to a new level of exposure with her personal confessions.”115

It was the nature rather than the amount of that information that would trigger a legal challenge against Kaysen by her then- boyfriend. At the core of the lawsuit was the author’s characterization of him as aggressively sexual, unsympathetic to her pain, and, in one episode that she recounted, physically coercive. The dramatic arc of the memoir would come in her soul searching as to whether his actions constituted sexual vio lence. Although the boyfriend was unnamed in the text and some identifying details had been changed (his occupation, his home town), it would have been obvious to any of their acquaintances—he charged— precisely to whom she referred. Under one of the torts that had grown out of Brandeis and Warren’s call for a right to privacy, he sued for the “public disclosure of private facts.”

Memoirs of this era were regularly portrayed as navel- gazing or un- seemly. Kaysen’s, however, led to questions about the impact of intimate revelations on others within the memoirist’s circle— and, more distantly,

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about the consequences of true confessions in the public sphere. To what kind of privacy was a character in the life of a writer entitled? And what had happened to the right to protect one’s reputation, one’s “inviolate per- sonality”? In Bonome v. Kaysen of 2004, the Mas sa chu setts court agreed that the boyfriend (now publicly identified, as he had not been in the book, as Joseph Bonome) had a right to privacy and even a right to control the dissemination of private information about himself. Yet the court acknowl- edged that “it is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate one’s intimate and personal experiences from the people with whom those experiences are shared.”116 The court went on to emphasize the public’s legitimate in- terest in Kaysen’s memoir, particularly its examination of how “a person’s physical difficulties would affect her relationship with her boyfriend, in- cluding highly intimate aspects of it.”117 Most importantly, however, Kay- sen’s right to “publicity” and “to disclose her own intimate affairs” was protected by the First Amendment. The court concluded that “Kaysen’s own personal story— insofar as it relates to matters of legitimate public concern—is hers to contribute to public discourse.”118 As one legal analyst described it, any other ruling would unfairly restrict an individual’s “ability to describe his or her own life.”119

In 2004, the law, like the media and the culture at large, seemed to line up on the side of self- publicity rather than privacy.120 It was an illuminating commentary on the dramatic changes in public discourse since Warren and Brandeis’s time. As legal scholars have demonstrated, the “right to pri- vacy” that the Boston lawyers envisioned in 1890 was treated increasingly in the twentieth century by courts as a frail claim against First Amend- ment rights. The privacy torts their essay triggered largely failed to shelter individuals from unwanted publicity, amounting to “a jurisprudential dead end.”121 The evolution of free speech jurisprudence, shifting notions of de- cency, and increasing deference to the press as to what counted as “news- worthy” had all made claims of emotional damage of the sort Warren and Brandeis laid out very difficult to sustain.122 As the most recent edition of the Handbook of the Law of Torts summarizes, “The law is not for the protection of the hypersensitive, and all of us must, to some extent, lead lives exposed to the public gaze.”123

Exemplifying the strong U.S. tilt toward freedom of speech (including commercial speech), press, and expression as compared to Eu rope, Bonome v. Kaysen revealed “a road not taken in American privacy law— that of a right to personality.”124 It pointed to the failure of Warren and Brandeis’s

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concept of an “inviolate personality” to gain any real traction in U.S. so- ciety and law.125 Or perhaps it revealed a legal as well as cultural prefer- ence for the confessing rather than the reticent personality. For some, the prioritizing of individual self- expression over the texture of public discourse was the wrong turn that privacy law had taken as far back as the late nine- teenth century, its effects on American life painfully apparent in the no- holds- barred quality of public talk at end of the twentieth.126 At the very least it implied that the conflict between the freedom of speech and the right to one’s “personality”— the right to express oneself and the right to be known in a par tic u lar way— had no easy resolution.

The issues in the Kaysen- Bonome dispute were unusual in being adju- dicated by courts. Similar standoffs had been fought in the pages of literary magazines, newspapers, and the court of public opinion, leading to a searching debate in the 1990s over the consequences of unrestrained self- expression. Biographers, autobiographers, and even historians would be implicated in controversies over improper disclosure.127 These were pitched strug gles for “control over the story of a life” by subjects, authors, and es- tates, each with their own position on which contents of a life ought to be shared and which sealed.128 Although the privacy of famous figures, living and dead— and how specific revelations would affect their reputation— was often the primary consideration, broader cultural sensibilities about the bound aries of propriety entered the discussion too.

One of these disputes surfaced right at the beginning of the de cade. Fit- tingly, it concerned the “confessional” poet Anne Sexton, known for writing about matters “many people thought should be kept entirely pri- vate” in the early 1960s, including mental illness, abortion, and addic- tion.129 Her life was the material for Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Biography, published in 1991.130 There was in this case no un- willing subject, no “unconfessional confessionalist,” as Susanna Kaysen had been tagged for her stubborn refusal to elaborate on what appeared between the covers of her memoirs. Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974, had left exhaustive files and clear permission for a biographer to use them. Her daughter Linda, executor of her will, was happy to hand over those materials to Middlebrook, whom she had selected as her mother’s biographer. But the volume stirred up a storm nonetheless for making use of more than 300 hours of tape- recorded psychotherapy sessions between Sexton and her psychiatrists. The controversy rested on the special status of medical rec ords, even those of the dead. These sorts of documents

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were holdouts in a tell- all age. Linda Sexton had, however, consented to their use, declaring, “My mother had no sense of privacy, and I don’t be- lieve it’s my place to construct one on her behalf.” The Sexton estate had moreover agreed to the arrangement and even planned for the tapes’ de- posit in a research archive. Even so, the American Psychiatric Association filed a formal ethics complaint against the psychiatrist who had consented to publication. Only several years after the biography was issued would he be exonerated.131 All along the way, Middlebrook and Linda Sexton af- firmed that the poet herself had intended that the psychotherapy sessions be part of her life’s rec ord.

Whose life was it anyway? Critic Janet Malcolm dissected the dilemma of who owned an individual’s story in her 1994 book The Silent Woman, a meditation on the ways multiple biographers had impinged on the lives of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Sexton’s contemporaries and the subjects of a later biography by Middlebrook).132 Hughes, who kept his own counsel about his famous, estranged wife after her suicide at age 30, had been lacerated by vari ous Plath chroniclers in what Malcolm called “pun- ishment by biography.” In a voluble world, Hughes’s reticence, as he well understood, was itself suspect. Thus, Malcolm wrote, it was “Hughes’s bitter fate to be perpetually struggling with Plath over the owner ship of his life, trying to wrest it back from her.”133

Casting the biographer as a “professional burglar,” Malcolm set out to expose the voyeurism at the genre’s core, which she likened to reading someone else’s mail. But she also made clear that such prurient curiosity was abetted by the machinery of a knowing society. Hughes had at one point, in frustration, written, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.” Malcolm strongly, if regretfully, dissented. “Of course,” she wrote, “as every one knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not ‘own’ the facts of our lives at all. This owner ship passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.” In her view, “The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time” were just an instance of “society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness.” Indeed, claimed Mal- colm, “Our business is every body’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is pos si ble in a social universe.”134

Malcolm furthered her point by recounting the tale of Sylvia Plath’s first biographer, who published an account of the poet’s life in 1976 without the benefit of any access to her family and friends, archival materials, or pub-

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lished letters and journals.135 How could this be? “Facts as such are rela- tively easy to come by in a society whose growing complexity has spawned a growing network of official institutions,” Malcolm explained. Schools, libraries, newspapers, government offices— all “ were there for the plun- dering, as every credit house and FBI investigator well knows.” This made it relatively easy for the would-be biographer to “construct a reasonable collage from the bits and pieces resurrected from these bureaucratic mau- soleums.” Malcolm went on to observe that this first biography of the poet bore a “striking resemblance” to the many later ones, despite their reliance on a more intimate trove of materials, including Plath’s own published letters and journals. “The traces we leave of ourselves are evidently so deep that every investigator will stumble upon them,” she mused. “If the door to one room of secrets is closed, others are open and beckoning.”136 The rec ord prison, it turned out, was a goldmine for the diligent biographer. As Susanna Kaysen had discovered too in dredging up her adolescent med- ical file, a documented life was easy to find.

The biographer’s ability to ferret out facts even about subjects who de- fied being known was most impressive in the case of novelist J. D. Salinger, the famous— and famously reclusive— author of The Catcher in the Rye (1956). Plagued by fans, photog raphers, the press, and those who wished to tell his life story, Salinger attempted to deter them all by retreating to his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and steadfastly refusing public engage- ment. Salinger, who was said to have “elevated privacy to an art form,” would nevertheless be the subject of four separate book- length exposés in the late 1980s and 1990s, with two more following shortly after his death in 2010.137 His re sis tance to confession was in fact part of what made him so captivating to biographers and the reading public both.

One of the more per sis tent intruders was British writer Ian Hamilton, who embarked on a biography of Salinger in the 1980s. The angle Ham- ilton took, however, was a postmodern one: the challenge of a quarry who didn’t want to be caught, a subject who resisted the biographer’s entreaties. As such, Hamilton aimed to make himself rather than Salinger the cen- tral character in the book. But the premise did not pan out. Janet Malcolm recounts, “As Hamilton pursued his researches into Salinger’s childhood and youth, his own role as comically thwarted biographer was pulled out from under him.” Indeed, “far from being thwarted, he was amassing a great deal of information about his subject.” Salinger, though he had been in seclusion for more than twenty- five years, “had lived in the world until

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the mid- sixties, and had left the usual traces.”138 These included many pri- vate letters that had wound up in archives. Eventually the biographer and his subject would come to a head over these documents in a court of law. Salinger sued for the rights to his unpublished correspondence and won, barring Hamilton from using the letters.139 The biographer’s ill- starred proj ect delayed, he would fi nally publish a much diluted and quite dif- fer ent version of his book in 1988.140

Salinger was the victor in that par tic u lar case, although ironies abounded: he had to publicly testify and also file his private letters at the Library of Congress.141 But knottier issues surfaced when his intimates— an ex- lover and his own daughter— sought to write about him as part of their own life stories. Joyce Maynard, a woman who had been romanti- cally involved with the much- older Salinger when she was a teenager, and Margaret (Peggy) Salinger, now a middle- aged woman with a family of her own, wrote not as biographers, but as memoirists. For both writers, the au- thor’s privacy was a cloak for ugly secrets, whether Salinger’s exploitative relationships with young women or his emotional abandonment of his family. Each described a need to tell her own story, in which Salinger just happened to play a pivotal role. These were “autobiographies of women whose lives were damaged by him,” writes a literary scholar, and which “narrate the harm that Salinger’s obsession with privacy caused for the women who participated in his private life.”142 Maynard, for example, recounted an episode in which Salinger turned on her for purportedly allowing his phone number to fall into the hands of a Time magazine reporter, telling her that the book she was writing “could be the end of us.”143 Peggy Salinger related that before taking an overdose of pills as an adult, which she knew would send her to the emergency room, she veri- fied that the hospital would not be able to identify her as Salinger’s daughter.144 Both memoirists made the point that striving to keep some- thing private could be as harmful as disclosing something secret.

In terms of content, these memoirs were hardly unusual fare in the 1990s. But their authors faced severe criticism for raiding Salinger’s care- fully curated solitude.145 Maynard’s At Home in the World (1998) came in for special rebuke, especially in connection with the author’s decision to sell Salinger’s letters.146 As a writer for the New York Times Magazine sum- marized, “For years, Maynard refused to discuss this affair. In doing so now, she is violating the privacy of a figure who is revered in a very per- sonal way by a great many people, both for his writing and for his decision

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to retreat into the silence that Maynard is breaking. She will be— indeed she already has been— called shameless and mercenary. Maynard knows this, of course.”147 Indeed, “knowing this” was part of her shame. Her lack of consideration for J. D. Salinger’s reputation, but also for her own in vio- lating his, was a key feature of the criticism that rained down in the wake of her memoir. Maynard was a well- known figure even before the Salinger controversy, a standard- bearer for what some saw as excessively self- regarding and intimate essays. The same New York Times Magazine ar- ticle displayed this animus, taking the writer to task by introducing readers to her fans— those Maynard referred to as her “website community”— who, it was reported, followed her every move on her highly personal web log, one calling Maynard “the literary equivalent of ‘The Truman Show’ or Princess Diana.”148 Such details, a kind of 1990s shorthand for overexpo- sure, cemented the case of the memoirist as exhibitionist.149

The controversy over Salinger’s “outing” laid bare what had been barely hidden to begin with: the gendered nature of the memoir boom. Many of the path- breaking contributions to the genre had been authored by men, including Frank McCourt, who wrote about his impoverished childhood in Ireland in Angela’s Ashes (1986); Tobias Wolff, who recounted his life with a hostile stepfather in This Boy’s Life (1989); and Dave Peltzer, who narrated a harrowing story of childhood physical and emotional abuse in A Child Called “It” (1995).150 Despite acclaim for these works, the highly personal nature, domestic settings, and emotion- laden thrust of most of the era’s memoirs ensured that the genre was readily feminized.

Women confessors— memoirists like Pat Loud, Susanna Kaysen, and Joyce Maynard, but also public disclosers of others’ sins in the 1990s, like Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky— were often the vessels for the new ex- plicitness about matters sexual and traumatic in public life.151 They were also routinely blamed for debasing both the private and public sphere and scorned for their lavish regard for their own small lives. For Joyce Maynard and Peggy Salinger, the implicit, and sometimes explicit, comparison was to the larger- than- life man they dishonored. While for instance Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called Hamilton’s biography of J. D. Sa- linger “decidedly unauthorized,” he branded Maynard’s and Peggy Salinger’s memoirs “self- serving.”152 The latter was “an unattractive and unwelcome book . . . almost indescribably self- indulgent, and it invades the author’s father’s cherished privacy to the point of disloyalty and exploi- tation.” It was, he summarized, “a blow beneath the belt.”153 Maynard

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came in for even more stinging reviews.154 Yardley wrote of her memoir that “you may . . . find yourself struggling to comprehend self- infatuation so vast and reckless that the victim cannot imagine a detail of her life so minute or trivial as to be of no interest to every one else on this planet.” A former Yale classmate of Maynard’s wrote that she suffered from “a delu- sion torn from the Oliver Sacks casebook: The Woman Who Mistook Her- self for Someone In ter est ing.”155

Against this account of the disrobing of a “private man” in the ser vice of self- promotion, however, was another story concerning feminism’s trans- formation of the meaning of the private and, along with it, the power of intimate revelation. Peggy Salinger described her “sacrilegious” decision to break the silence about her father and “generations of moldy secrets, both real and imagined,” as akin to allowing “some light and fresh air” into her life.156 “I have come to believe that my greatest protection comes in self- disclosure,” was how Joyce Maynard defended her own decision, char- acterizing it as a holding- to- account of a power ful man, as well as an act of self- liberation. As she put it, “It’s shame, not exposure, that I can’t endure.”157 Another woman in Salinger’s life, Jean Miller, applauded Maynard’s work: “She was very courageous in breaking the code that we all had, not ver- bally but emotionally, signed onto: don’t talk.”158

In tune with other memoirists, especially those who sought to publicize exploitation— whether by parents, partners, or priests— Maynard defended “a woman’s right to her own story” because, she said, “the most power ful tool most of us possess is our own voice.”159 Maynard, moreover, under- stood the attacks and trivialization she faced in doing so as a matter of gender politics. “One day I hope some feminist scholar will examine the way in which a woman’s recounting of her history is so often ridiculed as self- absorbed and fundamentally unimportant,” she charged. “One need not look far for examples of male writers who have written freely and with no small mea sure of self- absorption about the territory of personal experi- ence, who are praised for their courage and searing honesty.”160 Maynard herself countered her detractors with “letter after letter” from readers who found solace in her story, given their own experiences of family alcoholism, exploitative relationships, and unrealistic standards. Among those letters, she noted, in a gesture to sisterhood, were those “I received from two other women who had also engaged in correspondences with J.  D. Salinger eerily like my own.” Maynard’s reflections turned the tables on those who viewed privacy as “sacred” and her own spilling of secrets as “a profound

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betrayal of trust.” Although “the pursuit of privacy has been portrayed by many as evidence of purity of character,” she contended, it was just as often a shield for be hav ior that was much more fundamentally “inappropriate and invasive” than was her own.161 Privacy, so often figured as a social good, was here billed as a conspirator against the weak and vulnerable. Confession might offer a surer path to possession of one’s story or one’s life.

It was no accident that famous men who shunned publicity became cul- ture heroes in these same years— Salinger, of course, but also the novel- ists Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Unlike the Pat Louds and Joyce Maynards who seemed to thrive on the attention that came from public fixation on their stories, these men did not spill their secrets and seemingly required no such confirmation from an audience. In a tell- all culture, many admired them for bucking the trend. DeLillo in fact made this a running theme of his work. His Great Jones Street, as early as 1973, revolved around a rock star “who tries to step out of his legend”; the hero, one scholar notes, earns the admiration of “a cultish group” for whom privacy becomes “a revolutionary wish.”162 Inspired by a photo graph of J. D. Salinger that appeared in the New York Post in 1988, DeLillo placed a reclusive writer at the center of his novel Mao II (1991).163 As the novelist grasped, obsessive interest attaching to the recluse made those who opted out of publicity the most fascinating of public figures. Jonathan Yardley remarked in the Washington Post in 2004 that he had “largely forgotten” about Catcher in the Rye (which he judged overrated) since its publication a half- century earlier. But he could not say the same for Salinger, “whose celebrated reclusiveness has had the effect of keeping him in the public eye.”164

Yardley contrasted Salinger’s thin publishing output with the outpouring of writing about him. “ Whether calculated or not,” mused Yardley, “his reclusiveness has created an aura that heightens, rather than diminishes, the mystique” of his literary production.165 As the question of calculation here suggests, even Salinger, the most private of writers, was shaped fun- damentally by a culture of disclosure. This was not simply because others relentlessly sought to expose him, although that they certainly did. The most recent Salinger biography to date— a compilation of ephemera, photo graphs, and remembrances about the author— pledges that it fi nally answers the mysteries of the man’s life: why he stopped publishing, why he dis appeared, and what he wrote during those reclusive years. It also promises, via nine years of research on five continents and more than 200 interviews by which the authors “disclose, track, and connect” the pieces

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of Salinger’s life, to “place the reader on increasingly intimate terms with an author who had been adamantly inaccessible for more than half a century.”166 One conclusion of all this digging echoes a uniquely damning revelation in Maynard’s memoir: that Salinger obsessively followed his own press. “Far from being a recluse,” these chroniclers observe, Salinger “was constantly in conversation with the world in order to reinforce its notion of his reclusion.”167 The author “ferociously monitored every blip on the radar screen and cared hugely about his reputation,” refusing to speak to reporters only until “the press had forgotten about him for too long.” What appeared impor tant to Salinger, in an environment in which it was impossible truly to withdraw from the world— a truth his biographers inadvertently demonstrate— was that “he controlled the communication, the narrative.”168 Despite the apparent gulf between them, Salinger and his former lover Maynard may have shared this par tic u lar definition of privacy.

Controlling the narrative may have been the most that citizens could hope for by the end of the twentieth century, given that their lives were co- owned by so many others. Much as the Louds had aspired to be their own producers, memoirists seized the opportunity to shape and edit their lives for a broader audience. As a media scholar put it, “Repre sen ta tion in the mediated ‘real ity’ of our mass culture is in itself power.”169 Sociologist Joshua Gamson has made a similar case for the rise of “trash” talk shows in the 1990s and their par tic u lar appeal for those of nonconforming sexu- alities: “While you might get a few minutes on national news every once in a while, or a spot on a sitcom looking normal as can be, almost every- where else . . . you are either unwelcome, written by somebody else, or heavi ly edited.” On the other hand, “on tele vi sion talk shows, you are more than welcome. You are begged and coached and asked to tell, tell, tell.” Gamson sees what are, in one light, exploitative spectacles as subversive vehicles for “moving private stuff into a public spotlight, arousing all sorts of questions about what the public sphere can, does, and should look like.”170 The airing of intimate matters, in this view, might nurture a more hospitable public culture for privacy, understood as personal self- determination.

Easily caricatured and dismissed, the confessional memoir of the 1990s— still alive and well today— was not simply an exercise in narcissism nor an evacuation of privacy.171 Some memoirists wrote to puncture others’ secrets or to unburden their own, carry ing on the legacy of feminism and

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other social movements that had transformed the rules of public discourse beginning in the late 1960s. Others sought to take the reins of their own narrative. Pat Loud and Susanna Kaysen each wrote not only in order to add to but also to counter the information about them already out there in the world, whether in the form of a tele vi sion camera or the quieter but still weighty judgment of a medical file. In their memoirs, we recognize a desire to be truly seen. We can also glimpse the effects of the multiple forms of surveillance that had taken root in American culture by the time they wrote, continuous media coverage as well as the running bureaucratic rec ord. That those who attracted the most condemnation for their revela- tions were women spoke to the fact that, by the 1980s and 1990s, it was no longer just “public men” who were engaged in tending their public reputations or personas. Citizens of all stripes had a vested interest in the ways they broadcast their lives to the larger society, as well as new tools to put to the task. Battles over the memoir, pitting private citizens against one another, gave vivid testament to the fragmenting of an official con- sensus about privacy in the latter half of the twentieth century, an era in which the bound aries of propriety had been exposed as having a politics all their own.172

At the century’s end, the combination of new vehicles for telling all, the imperatives of authenticity, and every individual’s steadily accumulating rec ord meant that achieving some semblance of privacy—or control over one’s narrative— could entail talking rather than hiding, divulging rather than seeking solitude. That doing so could place one in a community of disclosing others meant that the confessional turn was never as solipsistic as critics imagined, just as a mania for privacy could prove narcissistic and public facing.173 What the talk shows, the memoir boom, and a thoroughly personalized public sphere indicated was that the old terms for thinking about privacy, laid down in the nineteenth century, were being sloughed off for new ones.

Publicists of Their Own Lives The memoir boom showed no sign of retreat in the twenty- first century.174 Between 2004 and 2008 alone, sales of those books categorized as Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400  percent.175 Memoir, a critic argues, had become “not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed

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or sal vaged.”176 The proliferation of memoir- writing guides and websites (such as one “dedicated to delivering the message that Every one has a story to tell and telling those stories!”) and the spate of false or faked memoirs in recent years are indicative of the memoir’s pride of place in American popu lar culture.177 Those who write and teach about memoirs are often rueful regarding the genre’s status: one dedicates her book to “ those who read memoirs and those who write memoirs,” as well as “ those who wish we wouldn’t.”178 But they do not doubt its relevance or staying power. As one of them puts it, “Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times.”179

Debate over the implications of the tell- all mode continues apace. Looking askance at the phenomenon in 2010, one writer believed that it fed off a “dramatic confusion . . . between private and public life.”180 De- fenders of the genre instead described writing about oneself as the most au then tic sort of examination available to con temporary citizens. David Shields, an essayist— and a biographer of J. D. Salinger— had started out as a fiction writer. But he found himself increasingly “bored by out- and- out fabrication, by himself and others; bored by in ven ted plots and in ven ted characters.” Compared to exploring one’s own life, “every thing else seems like so much gimmickry.”181 He hoped these narratives “(autobiography, confession, memoir, embarrassment, what ever) can perhaps produce some- thing that is . . . ‘truer,’ more ‘real.’ ”182 A teacher of memoir criticizes the critics who treat memoir writing as “nothing more than a New Age Excrescence, a latest fad, the apotheosis of a self- as- victim movement spon- sored in equal parts by therapists, confession gurus, and scandalmongers eager to cash in on the bottomless societal appetite for self- exposing dis- closure.”183 He argues instead that at its best the memoir responds to the Socratic injunction to “Know thyself.” Faithful self- knowledge is its true product, a “necessary wisdom” that cannot be found in any other way. The pressure on individuals to make sense of personal experience “is as intense as it has ever been,” he writes, and the need for exemplars that light the way “if anything, growing.”184

This argument over what truly motivated con temporary confessions— was it self- discovery or was it self- exploitation?— raged on even as disclo- sures on the page were joined by those online.185 Structural changes in the very nature of communications at the turn of the twenty- first century, heralded by the arrival of “Web 2.0,” both tapped into the confessional impulse and renewed debate about it. The social media platforms of the

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early 2000s were perhaps as significant as the telegraph cables and phone lines of Warren and Brandeis’s day. And they resulted from a similar part- nership of technology and commerce. Affinities between the new memoir- ists and the “new media” would be immediately apparent. Social networking, video sharing, blogging, and microblogging (that is, status updates and tweets) did not simply permit their users to “create and share their own content.”186 They practically incited them to do so, calling on users to offer a steady stream of opinions, stories, reviews, likes, and dislikes, pref- erably eliciting others’ interest in the pro cess. To be “invisible” on social media— meaning “to post content without others noting it in some way”— was to have fundamentally botched the proj ect.187

As technology scholar danah boyd makes clear, what was novel about this networked mode was precisely its encouragement to share and spread information. Personal communications, as a consequence, were more vis- i ble and accessible than ever before. Wiretapping and “listening in” had been products of a society that presumed most exchanges of information to be privileged or at least hard to get at. In stunning fashion, new media platforms inverted this “private- by- default, public- through- effort formula.” This was evident in social media companies’ public ethos of “sharing,” underwritten by their interest in the profits to be made from consumers’ data. It was also part of their hidden architecture, which ensured that privacy settings were difficult to manipulate.188 The new code—technical and cultural both—supported publicity rather than privacy.

If new confessionals upended traditional autobiography and even tradi- tional memoir writing, the web log (or blog) reinvented and recharged the diary for the Internet age. New formats for circulating one’s story prolifer- ated, spurred on by the ease of projecting one’s life into cyberspace and the lure of winning untold readers and fans. What ever one’s stance on this “global autobiography proj ect,” there was no gainsaying its appeal.189 By 2006 there were 27.2 million web logs in existence, with the number of new blogs doubling every five months or 75,000 new blogs being created a day.190 Five years later, a Nielsen survey put the number of blogs around the world at 181 million, with three of the ten largest social networking sites— Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr— housed in the United States.191 This “unpre ce dented movement of modern autobiographical speakers” was explained as the confluence of digital diarists’ “relaxed view of personal privacy, the desire to share their stories publicly, and the techno- logical access to reach a widespread audience.”192 Others characterized

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the trend less charitably: “Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show- offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry— for God’s sake, their dirty photos!— online.”193

The pivot to “kids today” was not incidental to the discussion. While the memoir was often the province of the middle- aged or older— a medium for those who had lived enough of a life to reflect on at length— web- based formats were initially the territory of the young. Fear and fascination about new modes of self- broadcasting centered on adolescents who appeared to have no understanding of, or placed no value on, personal privacy. A New Yorker cartoon from 2010 pictured a mother sitting in her attic thumbing through an old diary; her daughter asks: “What was the point of writing a blog that nobody else could read?”194

Some saw teens as harbingers of networked sociability, their inner selves firmly beamed outward toward a host of friends and followers. Others portrayed them as the society’s true realists, the “only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illu- sion” in a world of not just known but surveilled citizens.195 The most popu lar refrain by far, however, was that the young pioneers of social media were on a mission to do away with personal privacy. This was true even as scholars dismantled the assumption that teen agers were any more inter- ested in baring themselves to the world than was anyone else.196 In this analy sis, social media was simply the latest stage for strug gles over “private space and personal expression” that adolescents had waged before in their diaries and suburban bedrooms.197 Indeed, it was yet another site where teen agers sought to evade the most irritating privacy intruders of all: their parents, who often insisted on monitoring teens’ social media use. Privacy, concluded one study, was something that youth “are actively and continu- ously trying to achieve in spite of structural or social barriers that make it difficult to do so.”198

The publicness of social media presented opportunities for young and old alike: the ability to keep track of a wide range of acquaintances, and its converse, a much- expanded potential audience for one’s own daily life. It for the same reasons introduced new privacy prob lems. As two scholars of surveillance would summarize the state of things, particularly in light of the rise of power ful data aggregators, “If you figure that your life is so disor ga nized, private, and fragmented that no biographer would or could keep track of it, think again.”199 Managing what about oneself

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should and should not be made available to others suddenly became fraught with complexity. Social media users in response devised creative strategies to control the flow of their data. One of the most in ter est ing of these, as documented in an ethnography of teenagers conducted by danah boyd, was sharing information in order to maintain one’s privacy. “In a world in which posting updates is common, purposeful, and performa- tive,” she writes, “sharing often allows teens to control a social situation more than simply opting out. It also guarantees that others can’t define the social situation.” By emphasizing, excluding, or rewriting aspects of their personal lives on platforms premised on “unlimited sharing,” boyd contends, these users have both sought out and been able to achieve meaningful privacy online— even and perhaps especially when they ap- peared to be telling all.200 Teens thus navigated the unfamiliar techno- logical platforms on which social life now played out with the tools at their disposal. Much like confessional memoirists, they deliberately pro- jected narratives about themselves that might shelter private life or at least their preferred telling of it. They spilled secrets, but they also worked to shape their stories.

8.2. Blogs and other social media provoked much consternation about changing privacy norms in the early twenty- first century.

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Social media users’ ability to regulate how and to whom they are known, however, was hardly as simple as that. The same technology that facilitated connection and sociability carried unpre ce dented possibilities for surveil- lance, as well as the prospect of forced visibility. Norms around privacy were, as always, a complex amalgam of individual choices and societal co- ercion. The ability of giant technology corporations to set the terms for online “sharing” was a case in point. The deliberate weakening of Face- book’s privacy policies from 2005 to 2009, argue two scholars, “betrays that this medium isn’t simply adapting to new conceptions of privacy as em- bodied by younger people—it is actively shaping those conceptions and slowly pushing users toward ac cep tance of further exposure and less control.”201 The notion that users of these platforms in any real sense consented to trade away some of their privacy for access has been called a fiction (or worse). As the same scholars pointedly ask, “To what extent are we truly willing participants when a nearly universal architecture of com- munication . . . dominates our social world and becomes necessary for keeping a job, attending school, or having a life? Can you really opt out? Can you really even imagine opting out?”202 A journalist likewise ob- serves, “In a culture where people judge each other as much by their digital footprints as by their real- life personalities, it’s an act of faith to opt out of sharing your data.”203

Yet the fact that so many opted in was the easier target and more potent fascination for commentators. This included one cybercritic who dismissed blogging as confessional culture’s end of the line, where “narcissism and voyeurism join together in a closed cir cuit and the lines between inner and outer life dissolve entirely.”204 Blogs were not the half of it. Real ity tele vi sion, webcams, and smartphones were each roundly criticized for violating the categories of inner and outer, public and private, watcher and watched.205 That sense of transgression had defined the memoir boom too. By the turn of the twenty- first century its technologies of talk had escaped its generic confines to become the very texture of modern public life, ani- mating what one critic described as “the inexhaustible eagerness of people to tell their life stories.”206

Once again, An American Family pointed the way. The series was reg- ularly returned to as ground zero, seeming to foreshadow the nonstop exhibitionism of real ity TV and a larger culture of self- display.207 One twenty- first- century critic described the voluntary self- exposure of the Louds in 1973 as “quaint” mea sured against later developments (he noted

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programs like Fear Factor that competed for ratings by heaping abuse on participants) that would make it “grotesquely obvious that many Ameri- cans will do anything to be on tele vi sion.”208 The PBS documentary was also the acknowledged template for The Real World, a trail- blazing pro- gram that gathered a set of young adults, strangers to one another, in a residence in a new city and then let the cameras roll. It would, however, dispense with the sort of negotiations that had enabled the Louds some control over what would stay off the camera. The show debuted on MTV in 1992 and went on to become the longest- running real ity program on tele vi sion; at this writing it is in its thirty-third season.209

No longer were commentators surprised, as they had been in 1973, by Americans’ desire to play out their private moments before strangers. Ac- cording to one 2000 source, The Real World received upward of 35,000 ap- plications to appear on the show each year. Competitors such as Survivor and Big Brother joined the field even as individuals discovered that they could bypass them all by setting up shop as their own documentarians. The Internet by the late 1990s teemed with web cameras broadcasting “live feeds from their offices and boudoirs.” By the turn of the new century, a quarter- million webcam sites were registered, with more coming online every day.210 Once again, as had been the case a century before, the camera was critical to the shifting relationship between private life and public persona— and right at the center of debates over what was becoming of privacy in modern Amer i ca.

The Louds were not just precursors to this brave new world of self- display, but active participants in it. Ten years after the original PBS series aired, Susan and Alan Raymond made another documentary about the family. Titled An American Family Revisited (1983), it focused largely on how publicity had entered and then altered their private lives.211 Afterward, the filmmakers vowed never again to intrude on the family. But in 2001, reversing the usual positions of documentarian and subject, Lance Loud invited the Raymonds, who had remained friends, to start up their cam- eras. His request: that they film “one final chapter.” The occasion was Lance’s imminent death from complications of hepatitis C and HIV.212 According to the Los Angeles Times, Lance viewed this as his last shot at the screen and a chance to repair his family’s image—to prove to the American viewing public that the Louds were, in the words of Susan Raymond, a “strong family” and not a “disjointed, fractured” one. Tell- ingly, the newspaper reported, “He wanted to do it on camera . . . even

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though it was tele vi sion that had also deeply wounded the family in the first place.”213 It would be difficult to find a stronger testament than this to the idea that publicity makes people real, to the profound transformations that real ity TV had effected in citizens’ consciousness, and to the confes- sional impulse itself. Lance Loud’s private life had been uniquely entan- gled with his televised self since age 19. Even as it ended, his sense that its message required a large, anonymous audience persisted.

Lance’s desire to have his last days broadcast may not be particularly shocking in an age when blogging, sexting, and twenty- four- hour camera surveillance have become normal. But it should be emphasized, as had been the case for his mother’s memoir (and also of a later biography she wrote of her son), that Lance was not intent on disclosure for its own sake. He had par tic u lar ends in mind. Most of all, he wanted to correct the rec ord: to be known publicly as he knew himself.214 He told the Ray- monds that the film was “for the naysayers that claimed ‘American Family’ revealed us to be vacant, unloving, uncaring morons of the materialistic ’70s.” And he vowed that “this image will be proven wrong when Mom and Dad remarry.” The Raymonds agreed to the proj ect. Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family, which PBS promoted as the “final episode” of the famous series, aired in January 2003, portraying Lance’s physical decline, as well as his attempt to “sort things out about his life.”215 Uncannily, as if scripted beyond the grave, soon after the broadcast Pat and Bill Loud were reported to have re united. In this they granted “one of their oldest son’s last wishes,” the Los Angeles Times observed. The film ended, “as Lance wanted, with a written epilogue stating that his parents, Pat and Bill, are now living together again.”216

Lance’s biography, the newspaper reflected, was a “cautionary tale of the aftermath of a life profoundly affected at a young age by instant celebrity brought on by intense media exposure.”217 In its analy sis, the blurring of private and public matters had undone him. The New York Times echoed the sentiment in its obituary, reflecting that “overnight celebrity created special prob lems for Lance, as a young gay man in Manhattan.” The film- makers concurred. Among the themes of the new film, said Alan Ray- mond, was the “price of media celebrity.” Lance, he observed, “carried the burden of being the first openly gay person on American tele vi sion, frozen at age 19, forced to forever carry that wacky gay guy persona into his ma- ture adult life”— a sentiment reminiscent of Susanna Kaysen’s reflections on her own interrupted life.218 Lance Loud was, in other words, never able

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to return to a purely private life or to distinguish it from his public one. He was a known citizen all the way to his core, and this was a form of tragedy.

The makers of the series appeared scarred by the experience too. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Raymonds found it a “mixed honor” to be credited with real ity TV, of the sort that flourished in the new century, judging shows like The Real World, in a word, “terrible.”219 A retrospec- tive on Craig Gilbert in the New Yorker in 2010—in response to yet an- other retread of the documentary, this time a fictionalized version of the making of An American Family for Home Box Office— also found the director uneasy with what he had wrought. Prolific up until that point, Gilbert never made another film after the 1973 series, and “he has spent the years since then trying to avoid the notoriety that came with his cre- ation.”220 The article noted lasting animosity between the director and his crew, with Susan Raymond charging that “Craig destroyed that family.” The New Yorker suggested that battles over owner ship were instead the cause: “the Raymonds are still bitter that they weren’t given proper credit for effectively creating real ity TV.” Gilbert, for his part, “seems crushed by the knowledge that he did.”221

Lance himself took a less anxious and ultimately more generous view of the phenomenon. Twenty- five years after his screen debut, he was asked to comment on “the genre of exhibiting somebody’s life” and whether “ we’ve been exposed to too much of it.” He joked that the greatest contribution in his case was to supply a trivia question for the game show Jeopardy. Nevertheless, he thought An American Family had been worth doing: “It gave people solace. As for the invasion of privacy, we don’t have that much privacy in the first place, and offering other people comfort is a good way to spend it.”222 Acknowledging the already existing limits to personal pri- vacy at the turn of the twenty- first century, as well as the pleasures of disclosure, Lance’s reflections might get us closer than did his inter- preters’ to understanding what a confessional culture offered to those who inhabited it.

In the three de cades spanning the two PBS documentaries, private life— to a degree that would have astonished Americans of earlier generations— would be played out in public. A couple’s failing marriage and divorce, a woman’s strug gle with psychological and sexual disorders, a daughter’s emotional suffering at the hands of her father, and a dying man’s final days became publicly vis i ble and consumable in print, on screen, and

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online. Some proponents of the searing new standard of disclosure praised these developments for their honesty, arguing that they exposed exploita- tion and healed pain, enabling their audiences to form more empathetic imaginations.223 A greater number billed these same trends as voy eur is tic and damaging, a sign of Americans’ emptiness— but also their misappre- hension of the proper place of privacy in their emotional and psychic lives. Parties on both sides of this argument might have agreed that an era of privacy, as it had once been understood, was ending.

Was Lance’s last per for mance an act of control, a successful bid to take charge of his public image and vindicate a vision of his childhood? Or had TV, as he memorably charged on another occasion, “swallowed” his family? Was the documentary, and the whole apparatus of real ity TV and self- broadcasting that it gave rise to, simply another sort of rec ord prison? Or the only way to escape it? Were the new modes of public introspection in the late twentieth century, from confessional memoirs to talk shows and blogs, always and only a repudiation of privacy? Or were they a sign that a new relationship between the private person and the technologies of pub- licity was under construction?

If nothing else, the full- throated embrace of publicity at the turn of the twenty- first century— unimaginable to those who first called for a right to privacy a century before— made evident the ways past debates were im- pinging on the pres ent. At least some portion of the impulse to disclose and become vis i ble, to stage one’s public story by plumbing its private di- mensions, was a response to what had come before. The urge to talk so palpable in our own age of social media was already there in the confes- sional turn of the 1990s. And under neath that confessional turn was both the expansion of the documentary rec ord on all citizens and the failures of legal rights and regulations to enforce secure bound aries around the person. “This confessional age,” as one journalist put it, “in which mem- oirs and personal revelations tumble out in unpre ce dented abundance,” was in this light a long- germinating response to the dilemmas posed by a knowing society.224 Even if we conclude that the new mode of self- exposure exacted a price, we should not ignore the fact that it came with its own strategies for personal autonomy and control.

Americans did not simply start giving their privacy away or in any straightforward way change their minds about its importance in the late twentieth century. From a certain angle, privacy was valued more than ever in this era. So was the right to tell one’s own story. Critics who assumed that

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the confessional turn meant a weakening of Amer i ca’s moral fiber or that citizens had become inexcusably self- consumed missed the complex of developments that made personal revelation so potent. They could not grasp the way that confession might turn the surveillance society inside out. Early in the twenty- first century, a commentator declared that “our physical bodies are being shadowed by an increasingly comprehensive ‘data body,’ ” a body of data, moreover, that “does not just follow but precedes the individual being mea sured and classified.”225 In such circumstances, continuous visibility on one’s own terms, whether through a memoir, a spot on real ity tele vi sion, or a status update, begins to look like a tactic—if not an unproblematic one— for defending a privately claimed identity.

The impulse to tell one’s story that reached such a pitch in the 1990s and is with us still charted a shift in social imaginings of privacy. In an era of dossiers and databases, tabloids and transparency, privacy no longer was to be found in cordoned- off places— indeed, such spaces no longer seemed to exist— but rather in the act of controlling one’s information and image, those pieces of external repre sen ta tion that more and more seemed to con- stitute one’s inner self. Shape the narrative; mobilize the facts and details of yourself; get out ahead of your critics; be your own image maker, editor, and producer; live out loud: this seemed to be the emerging practice of privacy at the turn of the twenty- first century. Both a symptom of and a solution to an all- knowing society, the trend suggests that the age of con- fession may be just beginning.

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