What's Your Story?: True Experiences from Complete Strangers

In the vein of PostSecret comes this emotionally addictive and thrilling look at people’s deepest thoughts—some tragic, some funny, some adventurous—told anonymously and in their own handwriting.

The world is not made up of atoms; it is composed of tiny stories. And everyone has a story.

In 2009 in an Ann Arbor coffeehouse, Brandon Doman began asking passersby to share a story with him. Providing paper, pens, and clipboards, his only criteria was that the story had to be true. Doman then displayed selected stories on his website strangersproject.com. Astonishing in their honesty, intimate, powerful, sometimes chilling, and thoroughly addictive, the stories became an Internet hit. Over the past five years, Doman’s personal passion project—10,000 stories strong and growing—has continued to engage strangers of all ages and backgrounds and has transformed into a powerful movement of readers and storytellers who use the project’s anonymity as a gateway to reflect, rejoice, heal, and connect through words.

Now, Doman has carefully chosen 200 stories that capture the essence of The Strangers Project. Introduced by Doman, the stories convey the range of human experience, from the humorous to the heartbreaking to the profound, and are arranged to mirror the common encounters that happen between strangers every day.

A celebration of human curiosity and our need for connection, What’s Your Story? opens us to new possibilities and provides an intimate glimpse into the lives of others with one simple question: “What’s your story?”

In addition to collecting stories from strangers, author Brandon Doman has traveled the country helping raise awareness about mental health and suicide prevention through the nonprofit organization Active Minds (activeminds.org). He currently shares stories online and in exhibits, and continues to talk to strangers. He lives in Brooklyn.