Issue date: 11/15/07 Section: Arts and Culture

The third in the PostSecret collection

From a ten year old boy confessing his love for a girl he has known since he was six, to an old woman in a wheel chair warning that life passes too quickly, Frank Warren's A Lifetime of Secrets is just that: a collection of secrets that embody youth, teen angst, mid-life crises, old age and death.

Frank Warren is the creator of the PostSecret phenomenon, an art project in which he invites people from all over the world to send in creatively designed postcards bearing their innermost secrets. Warren posts a new selection of secrets every Sunday on PostSecret.com, and has published three books.

A Lifetime of Secrets is his most recent book and the range of confessions it contains is vast. An eleven-year-old boy admits he waited for his acceptance letter to Hogwarts on his birthday. An adopted woman writes to her birthmother saying she is happy. A person admits he or she is comforted by the availability of suicide. A student confesses to never washing the glassware after organic chemistry labs. A fifty-five year old woman admits that she lies to her thirty-two year old lover about her age. The secrets are funny, dark, painful, sweet, bizarre and touching, but most of all, the secrets are relatable; this is the magic of the PostSecret phenomenon.

Those who submit their secrets appear to be doing so as an act of catharsis. Those who read the secrets seem to be seeking comfort in the fact that they are not alone. Other readers may even be pleased to find they are not as screwed up as the woman who fantasizes about aliens and dragons while she is having sex with her husband, or the man who lies in a giant cardboard box when he gets home from work as a way to unwind.

But why do we need PostSecret to accomplish this? Why can we not discuss our worries, fears and secrets amongst ourselves? Why not cut out the middle-man? This is because, of course, without the middle-man, readers and submitters no longer have what is perhaps the most appealing part of PostSecret: the comfort of anonymity.

We live in a world where keeping up appearances seems more important than true happiness and therapists make a fortune listening to us discuss what we find too shameful to share with family or friends. It is precisely this kind of society that lends itself to the success of a project like PostSecret.

Thus, I find the popularity of PostSecret more of a disconcerting symbol of society's unwillingness to expose flaws, fears, doubts, worries and imperfections than a place to find comfort. However, on a slightly less pessimistic thought, it might represent a step in the right direction, and maybe one day we will be able to share our secrets with one person we know and trust, instead of millions of strangers we will never meet.

Frank Warren has also released two other compilations of secrets: My Secret: A PostSecret Book and The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book and runs the award-winning blog PostSecret.com

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