Lucinda Williams has been having a lot of second thoughts lately. This week, the singer’s memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, will be published. Ask her about important parts of it, though, and her reactions range from trepidation to borderline shame. Early in the book, she writes about suffering from OCD, which she began to experience as a young teen when the obsession caused her to pick at her skin so badly it looked like she had cut herself. “Oh God, that’s so embarrassing,” Williams says with a wince when the subject is brought up. “Because of the deadline on the book, I didn’t have time to go back and amend things. That was one of the things I was going to take out!”
Another concerns a story her father told her about her mother being sexually molested by various members of her family when she was a child. “I knew that was going to open up a mountain of questions, so I was going to leave that out, too,” she admits. “The key word here is ‘alleged.’ We don’t know what happened to her for sure. It was second-hand information from my father.”
