Read This: PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
Art compiled by Frank Warren (HarperCollins, ReganBooks)
REVIEW BY Tara-Michelle Ziniuk
Confession: I read the postcard you wrote your ex-girlfriend. I know you trashed your parents’ house while they were away so they’d think you had friends. I also read the suicide note. I know that you’re a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife and that you don’t believe in God.
Frank Warren’s PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives reads like notes emptied from the pockets of a generation of insecure girls, their daydreamer mothers, 35-year-old snot-eating brothers and bulimic Women’s Studies profs.
These 276 bright, often beautiful, art-filled pages are a compilation of “the best” confessions of the 10,000 Warren received after calling for anonymous secrets to be mailed in on 4x6 postcards for a community art project in November 2004. Following the art show came the website—www.postsecret.com, and now, the book. Content ranges from the bittersweet (“I steal small things from my friends to keep memories of how much I love them”) to the painful (“The night he died he tried to call me. I saw it was him, I didn’t answer”) to the hilarious (“When people upset me I draw pictures of them on buses going to Hell, Disaster or Ohio”). Collected, the postcards showcase a humanity that is fragile, desperate and inspiring.
That the most utterly private thoughts can also be completely universal is why PostSecret relates across borders of age, gender and geography. “So many of my secrets are there, without even sending a card,” writes an anonymous reader from Mexico. Mine aren’t, but these are my fears: my mother is the woman who wrote in to say that she only loves one of her children, I wonder if it’s me. My ex-lover is the person who sent the simple statement, “I never liked your poetry.” And I too, perhaps, “used to be pretty.”
