Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The iconic singer-songwriter and three-time Grammy winner opens up about her traumatic childhood in the Deep South, her years of being overlooked in the music industry, and the stories that inspired her enduring songs in this “bracingly candid chronicle” (The Wall Street Journal).
 
“[Williams’s] memoir transmutes the wisdom, pain, and hard-won joy of her life into stories that stick with you.”—Vogue

A WASHINGTON POST AND ROLLING STONE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Lucinda Williams’s rise to fame was anything but easy. Raised in a working-class family in the Deep South, she moved from town to town each time her father—a poet, a textbook salesman, a professor, a lover of parties—got a new job, totaling twelve different places by the time she was eighteen. Her mother suffered from severe mental illness and was in and out of hospitals. And when Williams was about a year old, she had to have an emergency tracheotomy—an inauspicious start for a singing career. But she was also born a fighter, and she would develop a voice that has captivated millions.

In Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Williams takes readers through the events that shaped her music—from performing for family friends in her living room to singing at local high schools and colleges in Mexico City, to recording her first album with Folkway Records and headlining a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall. She reveals the inspirations for her unforgettable lyrics, including the doomed love affairs with “poets on motorcycles” and the gothic southern landscapes of the many different towns of her youth, including Macon, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Williams spent years working at health food stores and record stores during the day so she could play her music at night, and faced record companies who told her that her music was not “finished,” that it was “too country for rock and too rock for country.”  But her fighting spirit persevered, leading to a hard-won success that spans seventeen Grammy nominations and a legacy as one of the greatest and most influential songwriters of our time.

Raw, intimate, and honest, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is an evocative reflection on an extraordinary woman’s life journey.“[Lucinda] Williams’s memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs. . . . [It] shows how deep [her] grit runs.”—The New York Times
 
“The often hilarious, occasionally harrowing Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is a bracingly candid chronicle of a sui generis character plotting a ramshackle but ultimately triumphant trajectory. . . . Williams leaves few stones unturned.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Remarkable . . . Reading like it was written on a series of cocktail napkins in the absolutely best way, this ever-quotable memoir of a born songsmith has something to offer nearly any grownup who has listened to music for the last half-century.”—Booklist

“Honest and raw, this book serves a slice of an inspiring life that reminds readers to keep trying.”—Library Journal

“Revealing . . . a poignant, plainspoken life story from a dedicated musician.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Raw and honest, this must-read account soars on the back of [Lucinda] Williams’s hard-won wisdom about making art and overcoming struggle. Fans and non-fans will be rapt.”—Publishers WeeklyLucinda Williams is an iconic rock, folk, and country music singer, songwriter, and musician. A seventeen-time Grammy Award nominee and three-time winner, she has also been nominated twelve times for Americana Award, which she has won twice. Williams was named “America’s best songwriter” by Time and one of the “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” by Rolling Stone.1

In the summer my father would drink gin and tonics. When I was a kid, he would say, “Honey, can you go make me a drink?” I knew how to pour gin into a shot glass and into the cocktail glass with ice and then pour in the tonic, add a piece of lime. Nobody back then thought there was anything bad about that. I remember reading an article about Eudora Welty describing how she would have one small glass of whiskey in the late afternoons before dinner. It was her little treat, a way of relaxing at the end of the day, having a cocktail. In the same manner, my dad and my stepmother, Jordan, who I called Momma Jordan or Momma J, would partake of a glass of wine or a cocktail at the end of the day, and my dad would open the day’s mail and we’d talk about current events or anything else. We’d sit in the sunroom off the living room. It was all glass and it felt like you were sitting outside. You could enjoy that room all year round because you didn’t have to worry about bugs but you could enjoy the natural light. In the winter it would be delightful because there was a potbelly heater out there to warm the room.

I had different experiences with my mother and her drinking. She was not a social drinker. She drank in private, a closet drinker. I didn’t realize this until I was around age eighteen when I was visiting my mother at her apartment in New Orleans and she came to the door slurring her words. For years she had always said it was her medications. I was used to seeing her like that. She had spent a lot of time in mental health hospitals and various therapy clinics and she was on medications. But it suddenly occurred to me on this visit with her in New Orleans that on top of that she was drinking heavily. I didn’t know she was an alcoholic until then.

Her maternal instincts or maternal abilities were taken from her by her mental illness. We were close until she passed away in 2004, but after a certain point I didn’t depend on her for anything. I learned at a very early age that I wouldn’t be getting from my mother what most kids get from their mothers, the stability and warmth and reliability and support. I never felt any pressure from her, either. I mean, she didn’t have that capacity.

Looking back on it, many of my traits that might be considered good traits came from her. She read everything. She played piano and she listened to good music. She loved Judy Garland and Erroll Garner and Ray Charles. She also introduced me to Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen. As I grew older and more aware of her mental illness, I began to compare her situation to that of Sylvia Plath and in many ways to Anne Sexton. Both Plath and Sexton committed suicide. My mother didn’t commit suicide, but she did check out in other ways, at least from the point of view of her children.

My mother was obsessed with psychotherapy and read every book about it that she could get her hands on. She was in therapy all the time and in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She had electroshock treatment back when they didn’t have the drugs for depression that we have now. She was on lithium and she hated it. Lithium had horrible side effects, like nausea and diarrhea and skin problems and weight gain and fatigue. Because of that she’d stop taking the pills. Then she would act out in a very hostile manner and my father would say, “Oh, she’s not taking her medication.” That’s a lot for a kid to deal with. Early in my life everything involving my mother revolved around hospitals and therapists and drugs.

I was always hearing comments from my father like “Your mother’s not well, it’s not her fault, your mother’s not well, don’t be mad at your mother.” I understood that. It was actually a sort of generous thing for him to say about her. But I was left without very much to grasp on to. I would think, “Okay, my mother isn’t here for me.” I understood that. It wasn’t easy. I had to pick my spots and pick my times when it was okay to engage her.

My mother’s name was Lucille Fern Day and she was born on December 31, 1930. Her parents were the Reverend Ernest Wyman Day and Alva Bernice Coon Day. She went by Lucy. Her father was a Methodist minister, so conservative you’d think he might have been Baptist. He was a hellfire-and-brimstone type of evangelical preacher. The Methodist Church moved him from town to town in Louisiana every two or three years. Both of my grandfathers were Methodist ministers, but my mother’s family was much more closed-minded. She had four brothers, three older and one younger. Her younger brother, Robert, died on his motorcycle coming home from World War II. That was before I was born. I always heard from my mother that he was the sensitive one in the family. He was a poet and, along with my mother, a musician. My little brother, Robert, was named after him.

Mom studied music but didn’t pursue a career in it. My understanding is that she started playing piano at the age of four. She fell in love with it. But music became her albatross, the piano was her albatross, because she wasn’t allowed or able to pursue it as a career. It became a symbol for what she could not do. Nobody in her family encouraged her to take it seriously. I’m not going to say that her inability to pursue a career in music caused her mental illness, or influenced it, because I think most of it was biochemical. But she struggled so much with not having a career in music. It affected her confidence or lack thereof.

We had a piano in the house when I was growing up. After my parents divorced, Mama still had a piano with her wherever she lived. But the piano would come and go. It was a joy and a burden at the same time, a love-hate relationship. She would long for a piano and then get rid of it after a while. She never explained why and I didn’t ask. When those feelings overwhelmed her, she would get rid of the piano. Then a short time later she’d go out and get another one. It was back and forth; she couldn’t live with a piano or without a piano. She wasn’t like Bette Davis in one of those old movies, running around with smeared lipstick. Her mental illness was more understated and subtle and at the same time monumental.

My mother told me that when she was a kid, her family didn’t have plumbing and they used newspapers for wallpaper and insulation. They were all working-class and didn’t care about school or going to college. I don’t know how one sibling can be born into the same family as other siblings, and grow up the same way, and come out so different. She had an intellectual mind, read good books. It was a testament to her capabilities that she broke out and went to college and became a well-read person because none of her relatives were like that at all.

My mother met my father when she was studying music at LSU. My mother’s family hated my father. He was the literary poet guy. Although they were both church families, his family was liberal and open-minded. My mother wanted to be in a more progressive world and my father offered a way into it.

Later in my life my father told me certain things about my mother being sexually molested in horrifying ways by her father and one or more of her older brothers, repeatedly, when she was a youth. This was confirmed to me later by my sister, Karyn, who attended therapy sessions with my mother when she was older. She didn’t tell me this for years and years and I don’t think she made the wrong decision to withhold it. This is unthinkably horrifying and upsetting, and I’m still trying to process it.

I have memories of my mother being happy, and of us being happy together. She had a great sense of humor. We would laugh at all sorts of things. But she would drift in and out of her illness like Sylvia Plath did. My father told me that she was once diagnosed as having manic depression with paranoid schizophrenic tendencies. Back then they didn’t have the medication we have now.

Mom talked about her psychiatric care and would quote passages from her psychology books and jot notes in the margins. She read Jung and she read that popular book from the 1960s I’m OK—You’re OK. She was very aware of her mental illness. After I moved away, we would talk on the phone for hours about psychology and the latest therapies. I learned so much from her.US

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