In 1978, I was an associate editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper when a review copy of a new book, Confessions of a Catholic Worker by Michael Garvey arrived in the mail. Dorothy Day, the paper’s publisher, waved it off dismissively, saying “I hope that it is HIS confessions, not mine!”
Already hailed as a living saint, Day was not so unworldly as to be unaware of a whole popular genre of such “confessions,” tell-all exposés each more salacious then the last, beginning with Confessions