Itching to Tell a Family Secret? Tell It to a Blog

Are you carrying the guilt of a family secret? Is something in your past too embarrassing to reveal?

If so, Mary E. DeMuth has a blog for you. The Web site she began, My Family Secrets, allows people to anonymously post their secrets and, she hopes, enjoy some freedom.

"I was a bit hesitant to start at this," said the Texas-based author, "because I knew the kind of person I am. I tend to take on everyone's problems. It's a bit heavy for me. But it's been really fun and surprising to see so many others visit the blog and then begin to shoulder the burdens of people who really agonize over their secrets."

Ms. DeMuth said she didn't foresee the sort of community the blog has become, where people read the secrets and offer ideas and hints to help the person who has shared.

If someone who reveals a secret isn't honest, she said, the blog "community kind of serves as a cautious reminder ... that you're not truly in the light until you tell the people that you've hurt."

However, Ms. DeMuth said, the overwhelming majority of posts come from someone revealing something that happened to them rather than something they did.

She said the site, which went up in January, gets about 250 hits a day, many of them unique visitors. She posts about three secrets a week, she said, and advertises the site by using Twitter, where she has about 3,000 followers.

"I think it's starting to go viral," Ms. DeMuth said of the blog. "It's not a blog that you really talk much about, so it's hard for me to gather statistics, but it does feel like people are going a bit viral with it. People I don't know are talking about it."

Although she has mentioned the abuse in her past in several nonfiction parenting books and launched blog.myfamilysecrets.org after her novel "Daisy Chain" swirled around a secret, she hopes her upcoming memoir, "Thin Places," will entice more people to be honest with their past on the blog.

Ms. DeMuth said the book will reveal the sexual abuse, drug issues and neglect in her past "not to shock and awe but to show there can be redemption from the most horrific things."