Lucinda Williams, Memoir: DON'T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU

Keith Richards, too

I’m listening to Lucinda Williams’ memoir, DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU, which I immediately began listening to after finishing Keith Richards’ memoir, LIFE. The voice and style in which the two memoirs are written are palpably different as “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” and “Happy.” Clearly, Richards and Williams see through the lens of the artist-musician, and that excites me. Both artists remind me that there is a (past and present) context to our lives and we are inextricably shaped by it. I’m genuinely surprised to suddenly awaken to my own writerly context. I had forgotten — or maybe I had never fully embraced my journey. I certainly had never connected my journey and context to my writing process. Thanks to Williams, I see that the two are intertwined like a couple forks in the road that eventually arrive at the same destination. (Yes, an homage to Robert Frost.)

Williams’ story is complicated. Unrequited love, OCD, a mentally ill mother from whom she was separated, a brother who disappears, two suicides, a father who marries his 18 year old student. Williams worked odd jobs into her thirties, and struggled to have her work noticed.

Her story is hopeful. She is determined. She believes in herself. She never gives up. She reminds us that if we keep working then eventually we’ll be rewarded. She talks about her career breaks, lucky or not. This is what I need to hear.

“If you don’t look, you can’t see.” (Lucinda Williams) This statement hit me in the chest when I heard it. Its lesson is profound: I cannot be the writer that I want to be if I avert my eyes. From what? From myself. From the context that made me who I am. It takes courage to see. Without seeing one cannot be vulnerable to the self. It takes willingness to heal, and to create. How can I see if I do not look?