Brief lives

They come from the US, UK, Uganda, Russia, Greece and China, their tales involve suicide bids, jail terms, even aliens, but they have one thing in common - Michael Kimball has written their life stories on the back of a postcard

Michael Kimball began writing people's life stories on the backs of postcards as a joke at a performance arts festival in April. "I thought it would be fun and funny, and that I'd ask a few questions and write a few postcards and that would be that... When I looked up, a line had formed."

The first postcard was for a painter who had quit art school in Dublin to work as an ice-cream man in Ocean City, Maryland, a few hours from Baltimore, where Kimball lives. By the end of the night, he'd written dozens. "I was struck by how eager people were to share their stories, how grateful they were for their postcard. My mind was racing with all the details - the secrets, wonder and pain they revealed - and the hope that I'd done justice to their stories."

I can testify to what Kimball calls "the unexpected intimacy" of the Postcard Life Stories project, which includes a blog of the biographies. Recently he wrote my life story. It felt like being exposed, but also strangely satisfying; the postcard doesn't sum up my life, but what got me to where I am now. It's a snapshot of a moment. There's a strong sense of hope and joy in it that, while I don't identify with it every day, makes me feel happy when I read it.

Over the past year, more and more people have contacted Kimball, telling him about themselves. Something about email communication, and the fact that he is a stranger, makes them very open.

"I was astounded by the things people told me," Kimball says. "I've heard about people being in jail, about suicide attempts, about communicating with aliens, about terrible things they have done. I'm sometimes asked how I get people to tell me the things I write about them, but there's no trick to it. I just ask questions."

Sometimes these interviews have run to more than 5,000 words, but even they have been condensed on to the back of a postcard and mailed back to their subjects in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Portugal, Russia, Finland, Uganda, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Greece and China. "As the life stories get longer - 508 words is the longest so far - my handwriting has got smaller."

The project has drawn comparisons with the successful blog Postsecret, where people send in their secrets on a postcard. "Postsecret certainly has a function," Kimball says, "but it's anonymous, and what I'm doing is very public - full names, photographs. A lot of the people who are participating are claiming - or reclaiming - themselves. One woman wrote to me to say that I took a very dark time in her life and made it manageable. She said it was a kind of postcard therapy. Another told me that he never thought of his life as interesting until I wrote his life story."

Among the more unusual biographies are the history of a Red Delicious apple, Kimball's cat Moose and a four-month-old baby.

Kimball is now up to postcard number 132, and admits that he is struggling to meet demand. "I have never turned anybody down," he says, "but I may have to start using a random number generator. I don't want to select stories. I don't want anybody to feel as if their life story isn't interesting enough. I have found that everybody's life story is interesting if you ask the right questions."

For more life stories on a postcard, go to