It’s a banner year for Lucinda Williams – not only is the alt-country stalwart releasing her first album since she suffered a stroke in 2020, the rollicking Stories from a Rock’n’Roll Heart, she’s also published her first memoir, the superb Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.
The latter, she’s said, was her attempt to write the opposite of the kind of “sugarcoated book like you find at Walgreens”. On that front, she succeeded: Williams takes an unflinching look at her childhood, with an absent mother whose mental health issues stemmed from her own childhood abuse, and a father whose poetry and worldview she lionised, but who also subsequently married a woman almost young enough to be her sister.
