mediabistro.com’s Rebecca Fox recently spoke with Frank Warren, the creator of the PostSecret website and its print spinoffs, and touches upon how the stories told on that site hold up considering the issues surrounding the authenticity of contemporary memoirs:
“I think it’s a complicated issue, because I think in a lot of ways artists are storytellers, and storytellers have a job, and that job is to take a story and have it reverberate with people, have it inspire people. There’s different tools you can draw upon to create that. In some ways the memoirist is like the magician, and you go to the performance to see the show, and you know that behind the scenes things might not always appear as they do on the surface, but what it’s really about is that moment of awe, of mystery, that makes you identify with those parts in your life that are mysterious but sometimes you forget about in our everyday lives.
“I know with PostSecret, I think of the project as being very inspirational, and I think one of the things that draws people to the books and to the Web site is that sort of raw authenticity… eople mail me their postcards, but there’s no committee, there’s no P.O. box. They just come to my home mailbox, and if I think it feels like a real secret, I’m going to put it on the Web site, whether it’s politically incorrect, offensive, involves nudity. Secrets are secrets for a reason, so I think when people see that I’m sharing these raw secrets, it really allows people to make that authenticity connection, which I think so many of us are looking for in this society right now.”
And, yes, every book contains one of Warren’s own secrets, but he’s probably not going to tell you which ones are his, unless you go see him lecture.