confessionalist

[ kuhn-fesh-uh-nl-ist ]

noun

1. a person who confesses in or as if in a confessional.

Word History and Origins

Origin of confessionalist¹

First recorded in 1820–30; confessional + -ist

Example Sentences

One of her favorite poets is a famed confessionalist, Sylvia Plath.

From Washington Times

In doing so he reduces Roth to the most literal kind of confessionalist, a charge his subject strenuously protested; in 1984, he sat for a Paris Review interview largely to dispel the notion that he was a confessional writer.

From New York Times

Over the past couple of years, Ocean’s former Odd Future collaborator, Tyler, the Creator, has transitioned from a bratty provocateur who hurled gay slurs with reckless abandon into a thoughtful confessionalist, one who surprisingly and rather matter-of-factly raps about his own attraction to men.

From Los Angeles Times

What’s remarkable is the way that her persona itself obscures this—the way that her aura of authenticity makes people think that she’s a confessionalist when she is working through character and the manipulation of craft.

From The New Yorker

The mania for physical perfection, the aversion to the reality of aging and death, the belief in a kind of identity politics that hinges on deliberate avoidance of the structural foundations of empire, the prevalence of narcissist/confessionalist expression in all the arts and creative endeavors, the constant self-justification in the form of demonizing various deplorables — all these urges seem to me typical of the irrational, anti-Enlightenment, conspiratorial mindset of what we might call the contemporary alternative left, or alt-left.

From Salon