An Incomplete Cultural Survey of Secrets

So much to say about the things we can't say!

One of the ongoing projects of my life seems to be deciding whether or not I believe that everything is connected.

I wrote about a whole lot about secrets this month. Increasingly I find that I like to simply pick a theme and let it guide me in my writing, and then increasingly I find that things related to that theme just kinda start coming my way. A related article lands in my inbox unprompted; a topical book catches my eye when I’m at the library searching for something else. When this happens, it’s admittedly very tempting to discard the idea of coincidence in favor of something more significant. Do these things come my way because of what I chose to write? Where would I be if I’d been writing about something else instead?

The funny thing is, I was originally only gonna write about PostSecret. Reader, I wrote about quite a bit more than that in the end.

Do y’all remember PostSecret? Starting in 2004, creator Frank Warren invited anyone with a secret to confess it on an anonymous postcard and send it to him. For the last twenty years, a handful of these secrets have been posted to the blog every Sunday. To date, Warren has collected over a million postcards — and if you want, you can still send him your own today.

As someone who has always been fascinated by the internet’s strange and seemingly limitless possibilities for connection, I was enthralled by PostSecret’s artful glimpse into the private lives of others. In the midst of the blogging heyday but still pre-Twitter, the brevity felt novel. I remember checking the site on Sundays when I was younger, hot laptop fan whirring, clicking late into the night.

When I started looking into PostSecret again all these years later, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one interested in revisiting its legacy. Funny timing — Hazlitt recently published a great profile of Warren written by Meg Bernhard. While the secrets themselves took all of my attention back in the aughts, I found that I was clicking into this piece with more questions about the postcards’ curator than their writers. What leads one to spend two decades collecting and sharing other people’s secrets?

After his parents’ divorce left Warren reeling at a tender age, he first sought meaning in religion, hoping for a feeling of connection within the church community that he never quite found. Later on, he volunteered for a suicide prevention line after a close friend died by suicide, where he witnessed the catharsis of disclosure firsthand. I was especially interested in the way Bernhard links elements of Warren’s backstory with his creation of PostSecret in her profile:

In the church of secrets, pain is pedagogy. Pain must teach us something, must have meaning, or else how could we live through it? We turn pain into a story, and make that story public in the hopes that we might get something in return.

It felt a bit surreal to revisit the PostSecret website after so much time away. The internet has always felt distinctly like a place to me — one that’s constantly evolving. These days they’re closing down all the old haunts I like best; they keep raising the damn ticket prices and entry fees. I’m older now, on a different laptop, but in a lot of ways, PostSecret feels exactly the same as I remember. There’s still that subtle twinge of recognition when you stumble across something you might’ve written. A quiet spark that tells you someone else has felt what you felt.

PostSecret and the All-American Rejects song “Dirty Little Secret” are both deeply engrained in my memories of growing up in the aughts, to the point that I couldn’t remember which one came first for me — did I find out about PostSecret through the music video? Or was it the other way around?

The PostSecret website was founded on January 1, 2005; YouTube launched on February 14 of the same year; the “Dirty Little Secret” music video was filmed that May, released in June. It’s funny to go back and lay out a chronological timeline of three things that were so formative for me, when my own memories are far less linear. I can remember the way I felt, what I saw, the songs I sang, but ask me for dates and details and that’s where things start to get a bit fuzzy. I’m always turning to search engines to fill in the blanks, for better or worse.

The “Dirty Little Secret” music video notably features a bunch of real PostSecrets, which Frank Warren allowed the band to use on the condition that they make a donation to HopeLine. When Warren watched the music video later on, he discovered that there were a few extra secrets in addition to the “official” collection he’d provided. Each member of the band had added their own.

A Katharina Fritsch sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art

Around the time I started writing about secrets, Autofocus published a roundup of confessions submitted anonymously by attendees of this year’s AWP writers conference. Writers were invited to unburden themselves confidentially via a small box marked “Confessions” at the Autofocus booth. Autofocus publisher and confession curator Michael Wheaton then shaped the dispatches into a collage essay, “made up entirely of other people’s words, strategically edited and arranged in a way that cultivated and offered larger meaning.” Wheaton says the curation role here is not unlike montage in film editing:

When I got home after AWP, I didn’t look at the confessions for a few months. Then I went through each one, typed it up, and possibly edited it a little in a document. That’s when the fun part of this kind of work begins. I sorted through and grouped and color-coded things, and arranged or manipulated them until it felt like there was a logic underneath the progression of the confessions and the turns they take. It’s kind of a juxtaposition game to see what creates the most subtext or resonance.

It’s interesting to read through all of the first-person confessions in this compressed form and consider the “I” of the piece — a singular voice pouring out a collective truth on the page. (I was curious whether Wheaton had also been a PostSecret fan back in the day, and the answer was yes!)

This was the second time Autofocus took confessions at the bookfair, and Wheaton noted this group was “a little more consistently ‘charged’ this time around.” When I asked whether he came across any unusual connections or surprises, he had this to share regarding what he learned from the unfiltered secrets of conference attendees:

There is apparently almost no writing, but a lot of theft, sex, self-questioning, and, I suppose, guilt at these things. I wasn’t as surprised by what we got this time as the first time, at least when people wrote things so specifically personal and complicated, but I was surprised how often so many of them next to each other either made me laugh or sometimes moved me.

My favorite of the confessions? Impostering is not a syndrome; it’s a way of life.

Little do my fellow internet searchers know that “What is the point of art?” is one of my all-time favorite questions

Jenny Holzer has been one of my favorite artists since I first came across an image of one of her classic installations: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. (This is also the title of a song by one of my favorite bands, Placebo, who I’ve written about in this newsletter before, so add a tally to the “everything is connected” column, I guess!) Holzer has been active for over forty years, so I’m still discovering new-to-me works of hers. And because Holzer’s art is often text-based and message-heavy (signs, billboards), it has the curious effect of slipping into my life at moments that seem particularly significant, even prophetic. Witnessing Holzer’s work is — in many cases, quite literally — akin to “seeing a sign.”

Most of the secrets written about here are very personal, but Holzer’s Redaction Paintings explore secrets on a much larger scale, silkscreening declassified American documents containing redacted revelations about our government’s involvement in the Middle East. The seed for the project grew from a request Holzer received to “reimagine a new landing page for Google’s search engine”:

“I wanted to see secrets,” she remembered, “a different secret every time I logged on.” She went looking and found a letter on thesmokinggun.com in which Enron founder Kenneth Lay thanked the then governor of Texas George W. Bush for a gift of art. Searching more widely, she trawled the websites of the National Security Archive, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She focused on documents about the Middle East, and when she found something of interest, she painted it.

The series began in 2005 (big year for secrets, apparently) and has evolved since, exploring a variety of forms such as maps, protocols, handprints, investigations, and more. As time passed, Holzer increasingly began to focus the project on the voices of “the interrogated and detained.” I was particularly struck by her response when asked about her use of oil paint on linen for these pieces, noted as being a more traditional medium compared to the installation work she’s known for:

People study and preserve paintings and take them seriously… whereas the information wasn’t always noticed or taken seriously.

The manner in which the content of a secret is conveyed — or hidden — can be as significant as the secret itself. What have we failed to notice because we didn’t look closely enough? What might we take more seriously if the medium of revelation were to change?

From the excellent Internet Movie Poster Award database!

I’d incorrectly remembered the title of Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary as Secrets We Tell. But secrets are stories, of course, and Polley’s Stories We Tell is full of them. It’s a doc that raised a complex question for me: When a secret is bigger than yourself, whose story is it to tell?

Stories We Tell is an intensely personal cinematic investigation, as Polley interviews the people in her life about her mother, family history, and the revelation that Polley herself was the product of her mother’s extramarital affair. Over the years, journalists had independently discovered the identity of Polley’s biological father, but held off on publishing when Sarah requested the time and space to share the truth on her own terms. The truth of Polley’s parentage was her mother’s secret first, yes, but the consequences made it Sarah’s secret, too. And so, Stories We Tell was made.

The particular story of Polley’s mother, and the making of Polley herself, lies somewhere in the midst of all these other stories. And Polley includes everyone’s stories in the film — even when the cracks show, even when the pieces contradict. In one of my favorite moments, interviewee Harry Gulkin had this to say:

The same set of circumstances will affect different people in different ways. Not that there are different truths, there are different reactions to particular events. The crucial function of art is to tell the truth. To find the truth in a situation. That’s what it’s about.

Now, how do we get that last bit over to the folks Googling “What is the point of Jenny Holzer’s art?”

Hmm, idk, might need more options

When it came to researching secrets, the library catalog offered more than a few rabbit holes. In the end, I landed on Adrienne Rich’s book of selected prose, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. In the essay “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Rich writes:

Truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

It’s interesting to think of secrets as threads of kept truth woven together. Every one of us holding on to some small part of something much bigger. Rich also writes:

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you… That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

Something I came back to while writing was the question of whether sharing a secret ultimately helps or harms. Whether truth is always the right choice. Rich speaks to the power of sharing truth as a possibility for deep connection. Polley made the choice to share her family secret with an audience, while her mother took hers to the grave. Holzer’s paintings shine a light on the voices who have been silenced in favor of a simpler public narrative. Wheaton found himself unexpectedly moved by the anonymous revelations of the Confession box. The narrator of “Dirty Little Secret” credits secret-keeping as a method of survival, but also admits that what he hides is eating him apart. And Frank Warren, it seems, has dedicated his very life to the catharsis of unburdening.

There’s that Joan Didion line: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” And I guess that’s what I do here, every month. Small-scale investigations to figure out what I believe, or what I want to believe.

But I guess some revelations come easier than others.

Author and illustrator Keri Smith presents lucky owners of her dynamic and unusual book of postcards — titled, believe it or not, Everything Is Connected — with a variety of challenges. Here’s the text from one of my favorites:

Use this space to write something really important and secret (something you’ve never told anyone else). Choose one of the following options:

• Destroy the card before anyone sees it.

• Mail it to a stranger.

I’ve been deliberating this pair of options while drafting this month, using Smith’s postcard to mark my place in the Rich book. After I hit send on this newsletter today, guess I’ll finally have to make my choice!

In publication news, I recently wrote an essay formatted as a search history(!) that explores my relationship to fear and a favorite horror film. If you’re a fan of cave monsters, complex female characters, and essays in funky forms, be sure to check out “The Descent: A Search History” in Bright Wall/Dark Room’s “Obsession” issue.

That’s all for now, y’all — see you next month!