Wolverhampton Literature Festival: From the funny to the absurd to the downright shocking, come and enjoy a night of confessional fun with Fesshole
It's set to be a homecoming performance for the man behind an internet sensation based around the art of anonymous confession.
Rob Manuel will bring the most cringy, funny, shocking and bizarre confessions to the stage of the Newhampton Centre in Wolverhampton on Thursday night as he presents Fesshole Live.
It will be a glimpse into the world of Fesshole, a portal into the human mind on Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram where people are able to send in confessions that they want to share anonymously and which Rob sifts through and posts online.
Rob, who was born in Wolverhampton, started the site five years ago and said it had come from trying out a few online ideas and finding that the confession site worked.
He said: "I'd put together a lot of internet projects just for the hell of it and I was messing around with this idea one afternoon and put out a message to ask if people wanted to submit some confessions.
"I put them up and then left it for a few months with nothing published, but a couple of people got in touch and asked what had happened to it and why wasn't I getting on with it.
"I think there's just something fundamentally interesting about the idea of confessions and it just intrigues people because its the promise that you're going to receive something new that you didn't know."
Rob said he had probably read more than 250,000 confessions since starting Fesshole and said that his editorial rule for publishing a confession was if it was funny or interesting, it would make it in.
He said it was an odd experience at times to be on the other side and never be the one to have to confess, although he did admit to having a good one if he ever felt the need to do so.
He said: "My own confession would be that the Connaught hotel used to do club nights and I'd get in free by going into the bar upstairs, buy cigs from the machine and then doing downstairs and waving the cigs while saying 'I just went upstairs to buy these'.
"Some of the most popular ones have had hundreds of thousands of likes or favourites, with one getting 156,000 favourites.
"This one was 'Our eight-year-old daughter lost her hearing and had to learn to sign, but struggled at first as none of her friends knew how to talk to her.
"One day, I noticed our Labrador run to the treat cupboard after she signed "treat?" to her. In the absence of friends our dog had learned sign language for her."
Rob said that some of the confessions which were his favourites followed his rule of "Interesting or funny":
Lied to my boss about spending a voluntary "charity day" at a local nature reserve for a free day off. Popped along to get a photo as proof, met some volunteers and spent the day helping them. Had a great time. Can't work out if I'm ahead or not.
Adopted a "failed" police dog who was given up for rehoming. Always been a brilliant addition to the family. Loving, caring, protective. Started to wonder why the cops rejected him. Then we took him to the woods where he saw a squirrel, got scared & ran head-first into a tree.
A once met a girl on a night out, she stayed at mine the night, but in the morning I couldn't remember her name. So I took her to Starbucks for a coffee.
Rob also spoke about the live show, which he joked was like Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour as it seemed to have no end and spoke about what people could expect to see on the night.
He said: "The show came from me doing work presentations and my instinct was to make it funny and people would tell me afterwards how funny it was and how much it was like a stand-up show, which was never the intention, more a way to get through a presentation to 100 people.
"It helped me with this show, however, as I decided to take that modal and make sure the slides are funny, tell a bit of a story and then go back to my journalistic days when I was doing all these kind of listicle stories.
"I used that structure and made it into 14 life lessons I've learned from reading a quarter of a million confessions, which just gives people an insight into what I have learned along the way."
Fesshole Live is broken down into two halves, with the first section seeing Rob, who dresses up in a full cardinal costume, go through classic confessions and the life lessons, while the second half brings the audience into the show as Rob will go through confessions left by the audience at the start of the show.
Those confessions will be put up on screen and the person responsible will be invited to come up and talk about it, something Rob described as cathartic, very funny, and an experience that can only be had by turning up and experiencing it.
He said that the hometown gig might be a funny one for him as he said that he knew some boys during his school days at Smestow School who would walk up to him and hold their hands over his ginger hair, which he said was under the pretext of his hair being on fire.
Rob said that Fesshole had become bigger than he had ever imagined and spoke about how he felt it had changed him.
He said: "I've just thought up a true answer to the question I occasionally get of 'has reading five years of unfiltered confessions changed you?'
"Yep, I no longer will use a bottle of shampoo accidentally left in a gym shower.
"I don't have to spell out why as your worst assumption is probably right."
