Sarah attempts a confession

Hello there!

I'm that unfamiliar name you see in the top right corner of the page and in the About Us section. *points*

I'll be working as Suzie's assistant this summer, which means that I'll be hanging out on the blog and on Twitter with you lovely people. So I thought I'd introduce myself. After serious consideration, I decided that the best way to do an introduction on a blog called Confessions from Suite 500 would be, well, through a confession.

This turned out to be a somewhat problematic decision, since most of what I know about confessions comes from movies and TV shows, where the character usually rambles an I'm-not-sure-how-this-works-but-oh-wow-I-screwed-up speech... only to find that the priest isn't actually in the confessional. Then there's the seminar I took on sixteenth-century Spain, nicknamed Law & Order: Spain, but all those details about convent scandals and witchcraft trials, being centuries old, are probably out of date and not, you know, relevant.^[*]

So I figured that I'd leave all of the canonical meanings of the term aside. Even so, it was kind of difficult to think of a confession that might be

a) publicly relevant, and
b) minimally humiliating.

I could tell you about how I cry every time I see or read the scene where Jo turns down Laurie in Little Women (meets neither a nor b); or that though I've lived in Argentina, Spain, and France, I'd never been to a non-coastal U.S. state until I looked at graduate schools (meets b, but not a); or that I'd never considered working in publishing until one of my classmates, after I'd tortured engaged her in conversation about commercial fiction perhaps one too many times at department functions, suggested I apply for the internship at FinePrint & Nancy Coffey (is this even a confession?).

As it turned out, despite all the talk about how the internet makes us perform some version of our private selves in public, I could not come up with one sharable detail that would actually be of general interest to an intelligent publishing blog-reading public. Or even of generalish interest.

Maybe the publicly relevant confession, I was forced to admit, was an oxymoron. I had to admit failure.

So truly, I am sorry. I don't have a confession for you. All I can offer is this apology-- and the promise that I'll never try to confess anything on this blog ever again.

^[*]For the record, I did Google "confession." It turns out that there is an iPhone app that helps you prep for your confession and that if I went to a website with the word "hug" in the title I could anonymously confess to the internet.