PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God

By Frank Warren

Harper Collins/William Morrow, $22.99, 276 pages

The fifth book in the PostSecret series, Confessions features over 270 new secrets from Frank Warren’s endlessly growing collection. Warren started PostSecret as a conceptual art project in 2004, and, since then, he has received almost half a million postcards scrawled, painted, collaged, and otherwise decorated with strangers’ secrets. In Confessions, the focus is on people’s private struggles with faith, death, love, sex, loneliness, and spirituality, and, as usual, the secrets serve to shock, titillate, amuse, and, ultimately, connect strangers to one another through the things they dare not reveal in their everyday lives.

“I’m starting rabbinical school, and I love bacon!” declares one postcard. “I still wear your shirt,” another cryptically confesses. These secrets address everything from suicide attempts to familial fears, romantic disappointments, and religious confusion, their sentiments made more poignant through the brevity and beauty of the postcard format. Some of the most arresting secrets in this collection deal with homesickness and distance—“You were the places that I wanted to go. Now I’m all out of destinations,” reads one. Readers may not share these confessors’ secrets, but it’s impossible not to recognize, on some level, the pain, joy, and anxiety behind them.

Reviewed by Margo Orlando Littell