of the world’ to depict the refugee experience in Canada and concerns of self-determination. A Mountainous Journey by Fadwa Tuqan investigates the struggles of the Palestinian people, through a confessional, intimate perspective, to challenge the patriarchal and colonial hegemonies which problematise the endurance of her people, and the place of women in Islamic society. Beirut Blues by Hanan al-Shaykht explores war-torn Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, from the perspective of the young female narrator in confessional modes, including epistolary narratives. Influences on other media Confessional writing features and styles have translated into and influenced other non-literary forms: especially in contemporary art through the use of prominent confessional features such as the divulsion of personal secrets and the presentation of intimate and sometimes scandalous details of the artist's private lives. My Bed is a confessional artwork by Tracey Emin: depicting a dishevelled bed stained with bodily secretions and surrounded by personal effects including empty vodka bottles, condoms, and menstrual-blood-stained undergarments. The artwork caused public outcry and controversy: employing features of the confessional style — including the presentation of intimate personal effects and socially taboo objects —in challenging the acceptable limits of personal and artistic representation. French artist Louise Bourgeois also explored elements of confessional writing throughout her body of work, especially through representing her relationships with family members. Bourgeois' 1974 tableau The Destruction of the Father psychologically explored the artist's relationship to her father through biomorphic and phallic objects, presented in a crime-scene scenario — the implication being that the child has cannibalised their overbearing father. The spider motif throughout Bourgeois' art, including in the Maman sculpture series, alludes to Bourgeois' relationship to her mother, and the nourishment and protection it was productive of. Candy Cheng's art installation Confessions, which has been exhibited across America, Central and Eastern Europe, invited viewers and members of the public to write anonymous confessions onto a wooden board and hang their confession on the work itself, with emphasis on features typical to the confessional writing genre including the catharsis of the act of confession, and the desire to reveal secrets. Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are both memoirs by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which incorporate features of confessional writing through the graphic novel medium. Academics have also expounded on the self-performativity and confession-based format of reality television shows such as Big Brother as having roots in the confessional writing genre. Critics have