Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

"Don't write about your childhood," someone told Lucinda Williams when he heard she was writing this memoir. "Just write about your music." Well, as anyone who loves her music knows—"Child in the backseat 'bout four five years / Lookin' out the window / Little bit of dirt mixed with tears"—you can't have one without the other. Williams does write about her rambling, art-filled childhood, as the daughter of a self-medicating mother and poet father, and also her decades of gigging before her slow-burning career finally took hold, as well as the series of smart-but-troubled men she was drawn to before she found a keeper there too, all with the kind of plain-spoken and tender sense of the past and her own self that will surely evoke her twangy blues chords in the background.