make a clean breast of

Idioms  

1. Confess fully, as in Caught shoplifting, the girls decided to make a clean breast of it to their parents. This expression, first recorded in 1752, uses clean breast in the sense of baring of one's heart, the breast long considered the seat of private or secret feelings.

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Example Sentences

They’re not wrong, but did part of this come from their secretiveness and unwillingness to make a clean breast of things?”

From Washington Post • Sep. 2, 2016

I did read — to make a clean breast of it — a King piece about Little League baseball that The New Yorker published in the early nineties.

From Salon • Jul. 6, 2012

Then he talked about his decision to "make a clean breast of things."

From Time Magazine Archive

Patton was ordered to apologize publicly to the patients concerned, to the staff of the hospital, and to make a clean breast of the affair to the staff officers of each division of his command.

From Time Magazine Archive

“I do,” Lawson said, adding, “I want to make a clean breast of it.”

From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann