James O'rourke. Sex, Lies, And Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession (Book Review‪)‬

James O'Rourke. Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. 215. The title of James O'Rourke's new book echoes that of the 1989 film "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," whose central character seeks the unvarnished truth through spontaneously filmed interviews but turns out to have his own flaws to hide. Like the medium of video, the genre of autobiography purports to be a form for truth-telling; but it, too, conceals and distorts as much as it reveals. This premise--that autobiographies lie, and that they sometimes lie about sex--is hardly a surprising one on which to base a scholarly study of the genre. What distinguishes O'Rourke's approach is its ethical turn--its thoughtful investigation of the relationship between the autobiographical self and others, and of the slippage between precept and behavior. In O'Rourke's premise, every, autobiography, whether historical or fictional, stages a conflict between its self-legitimating master narrative and an implicit "shadow narrative." The first says, in essence, "I am a good person"; the second is a suppressed story of harm and slights to others, of self-delusions that even critical retrospection fails to confront.