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?
My initial reaction to your question about an honesty “contract” as it relates to PostSecret in particular was ‘Yes! Of course the secrets should be true!’ While that may be what I emotionally expect from the site, I realize now that looking further into it there are perhaps other expectations that the site raises. You have already pointed to Frank Warren’s statement that PostSecret contains “different layers of truth”, but another aspect of the FAQ section that I found interesting was the content of the one of the postcards from Oracle Project. It is posted at the bottom of the page here: http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/news-faq/postsecret-story and partially reads “Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation”. That section stood out to me because it seemed to be full of so many inherent assumptions about what a secret is. The types of secrets explicitly listed are obviously negative, and though of course these types do exist, Frank Warren makes no mention of the other more positive types that are now found on his site. I wonder if this underlying message (if I may call it that) undermines the concept of a basic “truth” on PostSecret. Perhaps, just like Facebook and the other SNSs we discussed, PostSecret has an underlying ideology that it wants its users to adhere to. However, unlike Facebook, it seems to me that PostSecret is encouraging it’s users to emphasize the most negative aspects of themselves. Of course this is not to say that sharing dark secrets is fundamentally bad, far from it, I’m just curious about the extent to which the structure of PostSecret encourages users to focus on the site’s definition of “secret”, rather than adhere to a strict “truth”.
That is an interesting observation and something that I had not thought about when writing my blog post! I found the implication that every secret must be in some way negative interesting, but I didn’t think of it in relation to the idea of “truth”. While I am more inclined to see the secrets as art (mostly because it is impossible to verify that every secret posted on the website is true), I agree with you that Frank’s definition of what a secret is must impact the idea of “truth” in some way. Like the other websites we looked at in class, PostSecret has an audience that expects a certain experience when they log on. So when posting secrets, there are many factors that must be considered; perhaps these factors undermine the concept of a basic “truth”, like you said. If I had not been told that PostSecret had a certain emotional impact before visiting the site for the first time, perhaps I would have reacted in much the same way that my friend did. I already had the idea that the secrets would be shocking, moving, and painful; I didn’t consider the idea of a “truth” contract until I started thinking more about my role as a visitor and consumer.