PostSecret: A Lifetime of Secrets
A New Collection From The Internet's Number One Ad-Free Blog
Frank Warren's PostSecret.com is an Internet phenomenon, and a unique and touching art project. His new book, out this week, compiles hundreds of new secrets.
“I handed the most important person in my life the drugs that killed him.” It’s someone’s deepest secret. A secret that they have kept inside, and never told a soul. And now, along with the most candid secrets of hundreds of other strangers, it’s been published in the striking and moving new book, A Lifetime of Secrets: a PostSecret Book.
Post Secret began in 2004 as the brainchild of Frank Warren. The idea: people write their secrets on artfully decorated postcards and anonymously mail them to Warren’s home. Warren then displays the most shocking, humorous and touching secrets on his website. “I get about a thousand [postcards] a week and post twenty,” says Warren, who has earned a reputation as “Americas Most Trusted Stranger.” His reputation, along with his uncanny eye for compelling secrets, has made PostSecret the number one advertisement-free blog on the Internet.
A Lifetime of Secrets is the fourth collection of postcards that Warren has released. Beautiful in both design and content, Lifetime compiles hundreds of never before seen secrets. Warren has arranged them so that they follow the course of a life, the secrets of children at the beginning and the secrets of those at the end of their days toward the end. “This latest book is a biography about us as told through our secrets,” Warren says. “I think of myself as a storyteller.” Warren, both chose the postcards for the book and arranged them. “The number one thing is honesty…and the courage that it takes to reveal these secrets to others and ourselves.”
But, almost as striking as the slap-you-across-the-face-genuine secrets is the homemade art that adorns the postcards. Collages, photos, hand drawn images, each unique and each approaching the secret from a different angle. Warren began PostSecret with the idea that it would be a “community art project,” but admits, “I’ve been very surprised at how beautiful the art is. There’s an artist in all of us, sometimes we just need the courage to find it.” And the postcards, beautiful though they are on the website, are all the more striking in A Lifetime of Secrets. Many blown up to half a page, with a few full pagers and even the occasional two-page spread, the heart-wrenching details are on full display.
Beyond compiling secrets for his blog and books, Warren often takes his collection on the road. Book signings and art gallery exhibits are among the places you might find a PostSecret event. But more than this, Warren enjoys going to colleges. At campuses both big and small, Warren finds an audience with whom his collection truly resonates, commonly meeting students who say their lives have been changed.
The project has some very personal meaning for Warren too. “There’s one of my own secrets in every book,” he admits. “Anonymously of course.” And what secrets are Warren’s favorites? “I like the funny ones,” he says. “One that sticks in my mind is a Starbucks cup someone sent in. They wrote on it ‘I give decaf to people who are rude to me.” But while the humorous secrets are a nice break in tension, it’s the painful admissions that make A Lifetime of Secrets so haunting and memorable. “One thing I’ve learned,” Warren says. “We all have a secret that would break your heart.”
