Book Description

Confessions explores a woman’s pursuit of the truth about her broken and dysfunctional family. Very early in her childhood, Debbie had discovered that her life was being controlled by some old and very dark secrets. Then one day her father calls and summons her to come back to Missouri to discuss “some family business.” She arrives to find he is in a hospice, dying, and he wants to make a deathbed confession. Upon hearing her father’s story, Debbie believes her father’s actions were justifiable. Then she learns he confessed it once before—to her mother forty years ago. What was in that confession that destroyed her mother? Every time her father visited Debbie, her mother would go into hysterics, sometimes for weeks. Her mother and father had kept secret the story of their romance and his confession from Debbie for decades. Now she had her father’s story. Would her mother be able to tell her side of the story? Confessions as a novel addresses the relationship between a sin, a confession, and forgiveness. Which is worse, the original sin if kept a secret or the confession of the sin to the recipient? We are taught to confess, to seek forgiveness from the person we have sinned against. But is that always the right choice? What if the confession does not generate the forgiveness we desire? What if the confession destroys that person, ruins their life and the lives of others? What if the confession was given for that purpose, not seeking forgiveness but seeking revenge? Confessions have consequences that can’t always be controlled.