In quick succession, three of the big hitters of millennial women's writing have had something to tell us. Lily Allen, Lindy West, and Lena Dunham are no strangers to the confessional. A blunt summary of their careers could argue that that's what they built those very careers on. West's recent memoir has launched such concern for her wellbeing that, according to the thousand think-pieces that have followed, she seems to have brought down the entire subgenre with her. I'm old enough to have been around for the promise of this new mode of awareness-raising and young enough to have had it made the most impression on me. It is quite wild to watch the withering of this emotional exhibitionism in hyperreal time.

There are already countless internet column inches about Lily, Lindy, and Lena, beginning since they came to public consciousness, which happened to be just as I was coming to the first few years of my adulthood. There is an unavoidable big sister-like parasocial link I feel tugging at me when they're being discussed. So here I am, adding to the endless pile, attempting to write cultural theory about this personal form of writing when I find myself writing personal essays more than anything else... Which this might also be?! Looks like I'm in danger of biting the hand that first held the pen. Seems none of us can help ourselves.

Though their recent releases take different forms, they're all memoirs. Thematically, there are commonalities: sobriety; polyamory as a veil for betrayal; body image; nepo babies; a certain security in being white and wealthier than most; and an air of the stunted development of the millennial. That recurring infantilisation in each of the presentations around the work of three women in their early 40s unsettles me. Lena's promotional tour for Famesick has the theme of a pyjama party - it's giving secrets at a sleepover that will be promptly spilled and twisted on the first day back at school. The front cover is undeniably a waist down shot from the POV of a young girl, child legs sprouting from a tutu-like skirt, white-stockinged and black Mary-Janed. Lily is a West End Girl, not a West End Woman. Lindy implies another awkward adolescence with Adult Braces. This is less "I am woman, hear me roar", more "I'm just a girl". Is this irony? Are we being cringe? Is this the outcome of years of self-deprecation, that millennial women "could not adult today" for so long that we have actually regressed?

Hey, we're not perfect! Responding to the insane pressures put upon women by admitting that the veneer of the feminine mystique is just that, a surface is freeing at the first instance, tongue firmly in cheek. Besides, to describe something as confessional presumes guilt and/or shame, no? Some kind of wrongdoing, whether done by or to the confessing party. Why is so much of women's writing deemed confessional? Does merely existing as a woman necessitate guilt and shame? Or does shame simply sell from a publishing perspective? Confession, though an ancient human practice, is primarily understood to be Christian, and it's hard to shake the religiosity surrounding it. May I shock you? Women haven't done too well in many a religious tradition, particularly in the realm of knowledge. Eve wanted to know the truth and she was punished for her appetite.

You don't need me to tell you that there's so much appetite out there for salacious gossip in the information age. The paradox of survival in the "enragement" economy is that you continue to be in the fight if you sign yourself up to be cannon fodder. These memoirs from Lily, Lindy, and Lena are revising. Yes, they've been telling us about their lives for as long as they've been in the public sphere - but there's something we should know about what actually happened during that time they were telling us about what was happening in their lives. Of course, events in our human lives, how we live them, and our shifting personalities are clearer with hindsight. Therapeutic pursuits yield insights. Narratives can change curatively. There's nothing inherently wrong with sharing those amendments and corrections. But in the public arena of inescapable monetisation, is there any space for this constant string of revelations not to ring a little hollow? There is a clarifying force in this interview with Catherine Liu. Stemming from centuries of paranoid Protestant puritanism, confession is a tool of liberalism that is used by people to "authenticate themselves as good people, as enlightened people, and to burnish their brand". The girls are enlightening! Again!

What is the value of confession in a post-truth age anyway? One man in particular can say whatever he wants to distort and it becomes our cruel reality. Even if you have hard evidence - "receipts" in petty internet parlance - the tide can always be turned against you, e.g. Heard v Depp. However much truth we throw at whatever problem just seems to make it worse. What to believe in, when never believed? After centuries of mass dismissal of women, no wonder we keep trying to defend against gaslighting and insist on our own version of events. But this wholesale sharing of collective trauma hasn't led to a structural shift. Quite the opposite. Choice feminism is futile when the most vital choice in reproductive rights has been destroyed for so many and is under threat for the rest.

Listening to Liu, it clicked for me why I believe the greatest expression of empathy is to say, "I can't imagine what you're going through." Letting that experience and knowledge be seated in the other, not mistaking empathy for identical situations and then monologuing about your own. "Today's confession is all about look at me, see me, recognise me, I am doing this, I am suffering... The other just becomes a mirror and reflects on us how we want to be seen," she exasperates, "as people possessed of an inner life, people who have suffered, people who have recovered." That our slice of modernity leads to "unconsciously aping this form of confession that actually has no community." Huh, well if that isn't a neat description of main character syndrome. Maybe we are better off heeding a different GIRL. When asked via Instagram if she had any advice for young unconfident women, Jemima Kirke replied, "I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much."

My cloud storage space is running low. I'd rather jettison reams of digital bumph than hand over more money to the tech behemoths. I've accumulated so much shit over the years. I'm invigorated at the prospect of mass deletion and dreading the wade through what my past selves thought was important. Taking up the most space are the - tellingly named - raw files of a particular project I never finished. I try not to outright abandon creative ideas of mine but I couldn't make it work. I'd announced it on my paltry social media channels, my usual insurance policy of the time to scare myself into getting anything done. But the declaration didn't take. The marble swirl of elements I wanted to bind together kept resisting. Lockdown, Julian of Norwich, a friend's recent and sudden death. If I could intellectualise and present these confusing and painful feelings, I'd help myself and others - right? That's what writing is, what creativity can do - yeah? Julian, who had locked herself away from others in order to be closer to God, seemed to resist being trotted out by me for my own purposes.

Julian is well worth a read, especially Revelations of Divine Love. Her writing is some of the earliest surviving known to be written by a woman in English. In the book, she recalls a near-death experience she had in her early 30s. Deathbed-bound, in a series of hallucinatory "shewings", God reveals to Julian the eternal nature of God's love, in the radical presentation of a feminine trinity. She looks back at this significant event in her life, without trauma. Instead, she is fully in awe of a truth given to her but not solely hers to own, as she believes it to be a truth that belongs to everyone. One shewing of the blood of Jesus washing away all of humanity's sins strikes her as so simple and beautiful that she starts to laugh. Everyone else in the room starts to laugh with her.

Though, of course, they can't see what she sees.