Book Review — CRAIGSLIST CONFESSIONAL: A Collection of Secrets from Anonymous Strangers by Helena Dea Bala
Helena Dea Bala was an exhausted and isolated DC lobbyist, suffocating under the weight of her student loan debt, when she decided to split her lunch with a man who often panhandled near her office. They chatted effortlessly as they ate; there were no half-truths or white lies, and no fear of judgment. Helena felt connected and unburdened in a way she hadn’t in years.
Inspired, she posted an ad on Craigslist promising to listen, anonymously and for free, to whatever the speaker felt he or she couldn’t tell anyone else. Emails from people desperate to connect flooded her inbox, and she listened. Within months, Helena quit her job, deferred her loans, and dove into listening full time.
The forty first-person confessions in this book are vivid, intimate, and real; they range from devastating traumas, to lost loves, to reflections on hard choices. Some accounts are quotidian, like that of one increasingly estranged husband: “I want to feel that we’re not just roommates—that we’re not just waiting for the kids to grow up so that we can move on.” Others are deeply disconcerting, like that of a sex addict employed by a religious organization and several are heartening, like that of a mother who dares to hope that her daughter, born with life-threatening heart defects, will one day walk down the aisle: “Sometimes you need to have the audacity to believe that it will all be okay, that it is okay to have the same kinds of dreams as everyone else.”
In its complex portrayal of the common human experience, Craigslist Confessional challenges us to explore the depths of our vulnerability and expand the borders of our empathy.
Craigslist Confessional is a collection of personal stories told to the author by people who answered her Craiglist ad. They’re a heartbreaking statement about the desperation, loneliness, and brutality of humanity.
BUT…
While each person’s story is unique, I felt the individual voices blended into a homogenous style. I couldn’t tell where the author started and the storyteller began. I don’t know if this is the result of the author’s attempt to clean up grammar and such for an easier reading experience, but the individual voices are lost. The tone of each story is almost robotic, a spewing of just the facts. Yet, at the same time, everyone uses flowery, almost poetic language. Rarely do average people use pretty, emotionless analogies, especially when recounting horrific stories from their own lives. For each person to speak this way is clearly coming from the author, not the individuals. So what did we lose in the translation?
These stories are all sad, but I felt disconnected, as if I were reading a newspaper article rather than a first person account. Honestly, these stories are so alike in tone and theme that they could all be made up by the author. I’d love to hear the recording of some of these stories for comparison.
I saw that the author is being attacked for profiting on this book, rather than donating proceeds to the storytellers. Personally, I think that’s unfair. Writing is a business, after all. Just look at the true crime authors who profit from other people’s misery. Those authors aren’t donating their proceeds to the victims or victims’ families, and no one is screaming about the injustice.
That being said, I got an uncomfortable vibe from the author’s introduction in this book. She basically tells us this entire endeavor was altruistic. She did it solely to let these people feel heard. I don’t for a minute discount the gift she gives these people by simply listening, but let’s be honest; she was also getting something out of it. While I don’t agree with the scuttlebutt that she’s exploiting these people for financial gain, I do think there was an end goal here. Her denial only feeds the fodder.
We all benefit from listening to and reading other people’s stories, but this collection didn’t live up to my expectations.
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