Remember when it took some digging to unearth secrets? When guilt and, repression were still powerful enforcers? In the aftermath of Freud and Jung, the unconscious seemed like a rich treasure bed, a sunken Atlantis of racial myth and murky memories, a crumbling Edgar Allan Poe estate choked with moss. To read one of Freud's case studies is to descend a spiral staircase where steps are broken or missing, dreams contain puns, and puns yield clues to primal events, usually involving some sexual eye-popper. However mistaken Freud's treatment may have been of "Dora" and the "Wolf Man," his case studies survive as detective literature, owing to the ingenious brainwork that he lavished against his patients' resistance. An element of play, a dogged glee, peeps through his struggle to free them of their fetters. In his analysis of "Dora," Freud modestly denied that he employed magical technique. Unlocking secrets was mostly a matter of being receptive, he claimed.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish.

Now the problem is the opposite: getting people to put a cork in it. What was once quite possible to accomplish has become impossible to stop. Since the 1970s, the deluge of pop-psych bestsellers, celebrity confessionals and tabloid talk shows has made Freud's intellectual heavy-lifting seem as antiquated as washing by hand. Even our deepest, darkest secrets seem shallow now—easy pickings. Our once-hidden shames have become publicity hounds. It's as if our psyches are no longer labyrinths or flooded basements, but well-lit TV studios where we swivel in the guest chair, awaiting our cue. The recent rash of personal memoirs and autobiographical novels (Bastard Out of Carolina, The Liars' Club, Drinking: A Love Story, The Blue Suit, Prozac Nation, Autobiography of a Face) bear witness to this desire to show one's pain in plain sight. Some memoir-writers are legitimately trying to clarify for themselves and the reader the experience of a cruel upbringing or an unfortunate twist of fate; others are simply peddling their stories for fame. Either way, we're approaching saturation agony overload. I have three writer-friends currently working on memoirs. This summer the Iowa Writing Series is offering a weeklong workshop in "the powerful form of crisis memoir," in which students are asked to bring manuscripts of their own "survival stories."

With so many memoirs covering so many addictions and afflictions, the confessions have gotten kinkier and more gossipy, as writers add extra salsa to stand out from the growing herd. In the last few years we've had Michael Ryan confess to molesting the family dog in Secret Life, Daphne Metkin getting spanked in The New Yorker, the English writer Blake Morrison describe getting an erection while putting his young daughter to bed in As If (her rounded buttocks, etc.); and soon we will have Naomi Wolfs Promiscuities: An American Girlhood and Katie Roiphe's memoir about her sister and drugs. But no crisis memoir has attracted more fireflies than Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss. Prefaced with a quotation from Francois Mauriac (classy dead French writer), this is a book that gift wraps its sordid secret in a Tiffany box. It's incest with a twist, trash with a capital "T."

Harrison is the author of three novels, Thicker than Water, Exposure and Poison, along with numerous magazine articles about herself for Vogue. For one of the Vogue pieces, a testy complaint about being treated as a bimbo just because she happens to be blond ("as if ... in demonstrating both intelligence and blondness, I had broken some unspoken rule"), Harrison posed in fish net stockings and a tacky dress slit thigh-high. The irony seemed lost on her. Her husband, Colin Harrison, is an editor at Harper's and the author of a breathless literary thriller called Manhattan Nocturne. He has also signed a reported million-dollar two-book deal. Their star-quality as a literary couple has made them attractive bait in the piranha tank of pop journalism.