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Book Review: PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives

“I miss feeling close to God.”
“I masturbate to pictures of Civil War soldiers.”
“I ate all the blueberries (and they were delicious).”

These are the secrets in PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. Three friends tried to steal my review copy before I took it home. That’d be grand larceny — this full-color compilation of postcards from the blog/art project PostSecret is a richly textured incarnation of the original gallery of postcards, each nearly tangible on its pages.

PostSecret began, as Frank Warren’s introduction explains, when Warren handed 3,000 postcards to strangers. The back of each card invited anyone to tell a secret on the blank front for a group art project. The instructions read, “Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.” The tips: be brief, be legible, be creative.

The cards picked for the project and the blog are just that, and for the book, Warren chose not just visually stunning cards, but also especially deep secrets.

The cards, a selection from cards already published on the blog and exhibited in a traveling gallery, are presented without commentary. There are a half-dozen spreads with giant quotes in serifs, and Warren only guesses at one card’s origin.

One of the first PostSecrets I received looked like nothing more than a worn postcard filled with two shopping lists. But squeezed into the corner was a soulful admission, “I am still struggling with what I’ve become.” … From the clues on this card, I imagined that this person had an internal struggle about sharing the secret. It was so difficult that they tried to use up the postcard as a shopping list, twice. But the urge to reconcile with a painful personal truth was so strong that they were ultimately able to find the courage to share it.

Warren finds sending a secret to be a release and a lightening. “I like to believe,” he writes, “that whenever a painful secret ends its trip to my mailbox, a much longer personal journey of healing is beginning–for all of us.” Many cards refer to family problems, sexual assault, deep-seated insecurity, and failed psychotherapy. Readers have told Warren that they want to tell card-senders that things will be okay, that pain is part of life. PostSecret helps heal more than the secret-senders: part of the book’s proceeds will fund the National Hopeline Network, a suicide hotline.

I’m most satisfied with the production quality. Each card is at least life-sized and legible. Several fill an oversized page, and many form complete spreads. Creative choices for spreads highlight less obvious cards. On a mostly blank lined index card, inked flowers grow from the lower left corner. One line near the bottom reads, “The love of my life is ugly.”

There are obvious artistic choices for spreads, such as a fine watercolor of two lovers under the handwritten lines, “I masturbate to feel good. I have sex to feel wanted, and I hate myself for that.” But a surprising number of complicated cards are left as quarter pages, as intricately vibrant as the originals. Cards are sized and arranged for pacing and thematic flow.

It’s clear why Warren insists on physical cards and not e-mailed submissions. Many cards bear creases, tears, and signs of unique materials. Most show a scar of short lines, like an emission spectrum, from the postal scanner. Some are stamped with incongruous postmarks. These are, importantly, physical manifestations of the secrets they convey. The secret is best expunged from the mental world of guilt and deceit through a process of writing, drawing, and mailing off. Until you hold these cards in your hands, you won’t know the answer to “Why make a book of pictures already online?” These are the words made flesh.

Regan Books will release PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives tomorrow. It’s $16.47 on Amazon, list price $24.95.

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Creativity, Featured, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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