One would have thought Nicholas Clee had plenty of reasons to be content. Former editor of the Bookseller and a prolific journalist, he has had an enviable career. He is happily married with two daughters. However, as his fascinating confessional memoir, Things I Am Ashamed Of, shows, even the most outwardly successful people can be tormented by guilt and insecurity.

Being an exceptionally nosy person, I relish the rawness of the digital memoir. Fewer (if any) hands in the editing process and a quicker turnround time mean they tend to be less polished than a book and, as a result, truer to the writer's personality.

Things I Am Ashamed O f is an honest book, at points painfully so. Clee follows through on the title's promise, serving up a lifetime of regrets about his behaviour to others and his moral and intellectual failings.

We learn about the time he and his schoolfriends ganged up on a classmate. How when he was 17 he got a girl pregnant and she had an abortion. How when his mother told him she had cancer he was distracted by thoughts of his journey home. How he was no good at the managerial side of being an editor. How he only scraped a pass at grade five piano.

The writing must have been a cathartic process, but it is full of pleasure for the reader, too. Clee finds solace in literature and writes perceptively about Philip Larkin, Julian Barnes and Stefan Zweig. He poses interesting philosophical questions: is our childhood self our true self? Why is happiness elusive?

The final chapter, which draws parallels between the author's own guilt and that of Nazi collaborator Richard Strauss, left me feeling that Clee is a kind and clever man cursed with an overactive conscience.