Katha Pollitt’s confessional collection, “Learning to Drive,” a departure from her usual political writing, has been met with derision and discomfort. “So why would someone like Pollitt — so far out of the trenches of confessional journalism — dive in headfirst? Well, perhaps she feels she has a lot to say about the way human beings trust and love and how the smartest among us willingly go deaf and dumb, how the most confident of us go soft, how the savviest get blindsided.”