But I think the book doesn't entirely fit into the confessional mode either because the narrator doesn't ever imagine an audience for her words, except of course for Aidan, and she is never able to step outside herself to get the perspective most confessional writing has. Absolutely, because there is no receiving. The character knows that she will actually never send the letter to Aidan, so the act of addressing the letter to him is what both frustrates and satisfies her. By the end she is able to realize that all along she has been writing these letters to herself and not to Aidan, although I would presume that she would never read them to herself again, meaning that the act of receiving is still irrelevant. Well, so far there hasn't been much of a critical response at all.
Most readers expect, to varying degrees, to be challenged by poetry.
And when people do start to dance around the question of autobiography with me I usually just say that the book is an extrapolated autobiography, an imagined version of my life, an exploration of possibilities. And it seemed appropriate to use the trope-heavy forms of the epistolary, confessional, etc., to explore that.