Looking for stories where characters talk about hardship

Post date: 2021-04-08 17:04:17

I'm looking for third-person POV stories where a character is telling another character about a difficult experience they've had in the past.

To be more specific, I'm trying to find examples of conversations that are confessional in nature -- for example, where one character is telling another about a difficult experience or hardship they had undergone years ago. It could either be something that the character did to someone else, like bullying a classmate as a child, or, conversely, something that someone else did to the character, like a teacher deliberately humiliating them in front of a class.

I'm specifically not looking for first-person accounts, where the narrator is recounting an event to the reader. I'm looking for third-person accounts where one character is talking to another. One of the few examples I can come up with is a pretty gross and misogynist story by Harlan Ellison called "All the Birds Come Home to Roost," where one character is telling another about his horrible marriage, which ended really badly. There's also one other one from Stephen King's "Carrie," where one character is telling another about a time he kicked a kid when they were in grade school.

This is a pretty narrow category, I guess, but I'm hoping the hive mind can help me find a few examples. I'm specifically looking for novels and short stories rather than movies or TV, but if there are examples from movies or TV, those could help too. I'm not squeamish about subject matter, so any type of story is fine.

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