STICK TO TELEVISION

In Robert Plunkett’s insufferably glib review of what he calls “confessional memoirs,” (‘The Blue Suit,’ Nov. 12), he confesses that he buys these books “to be titillated, thrilled, entertained,” then--without so much as a nod toward reasoned argument--claims that his own silly motives equal “the reader’s expectations” and therefore the “confessional memoir” is an “invariably disappointing form.” This makes garden-variety sophistry look like Euclid. Thank god most buyers of literary books are still not quite as lowbrow as Plunkett, whose motives for reading would obviously be better satisfied by watching daytime TV.

He is right about one thing, though: I did not write “Secret Life” to titillate, thrill or entertain him. He is completely wrong and spectacularly presumptuous to assert that I did write it to ask for “forgiveness”: The power of forgiveness is certainly not his, nor any readers’, and I can’t imagine any writer foolish enough to think so. “Confessional,” coined as a literary term more than 30 years ago to characterize the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, has itself become degraded beyond usefulness and does not begin to describe a story that transcends the individuality of its teller, which, by the testimony of a great many readers, “Secret Life” happily does.

MICHAEL RYAN, LAGUNA BEACH