As we were discussing Six Word Memoir and PostSecret in our class on Thursday, I started thinking about an interesting discussion I had with a close friend in high school. As a teenager, reading the Sunday Secrets on the PostSecret website was a part of my weekend routine. The secrets were a popular topic of conversation in my high school, and my friends and I would always discuss the project over lunch on Mondays.
One day at school I was discussing PostSecret with a friend, and she made a comment that stuck with me. She wasn’t as impressed with the ideas behind PostSecret as many of our other friends were, and during our conversation she told me that she believed many of the secrets to be untruths. This impacted her view of the project enormously; PostSecret was of little or no value to her because she couldn’t be certain whether or not the secrets reflected reality.
This seems to be an issue that many visitors to PostSecret have thought about. On PostSecret’s Frequently Asked Questions page, one of the questions PostSecret addresses is, “Are all 500,000 secrets true?” The reply states, “… I think of each postcard as a work of art. And as art, secrets can have different layers of truth. Some can be both true and false, others can become true over time depending on our choices.”
I am interested in the “contract” of honesty that readers of memoir and life narrative feel they have with an author, and whether or not this contract is impacted by form or anonymity.
We discussed the controversy surrounding James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces briefly in our class as an example of the outrage that can be created through the embellishment or alteration of reality in a published life narrative. Many readers had issues with Frey’s book because he implied absolute truth by not explicitly saying he had altered the facts. As Edward Wyatt points out in his article for the New York Times:
“It is not at all uncommon to see new books marketed as nonfiction containing notes to readers saying the author has altered the time sequence of events, created composite characters, changed names or otherwise made up details of a memoir. ‘A Million Little Pieces,’ however, contains no such disclaimer.”
I think the reply to the question about truth on PostSecret’s FAQ page acts as a “disclaimer” in many ways. The answer puts forward the idea that uncertainty is unavoidable and that the postcards should be seen as art; the “truth” of them lies in their consumption and their interaction with readers. The secrets can become true, or make you realize truth– ideas that are central to PostSecret as a community and movement.
Do you think that one form of memoir carries a more powerful honesty “contract” than another? Would you expect the same “truth” from Six Word Memoir as you would PostSecret? What about Facebook or memoirs in print?