READERS GUIDE

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams Discussion Questions


1. “I was born on January 26, 1953, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. You could say that I was a born fighter.” What stories from the memoir support this assertion?
2. How does Lucinda Williams’s life—particularly her upbringing—influence her songs? How is your life reflected in your own creativity?
3. What about Williams’s family and experiences go against southern stereotypes? What does “my South” look like to Williams?
4. “It might have been the most important lesson he ever taught me, to be able to accept and move in both the world you were born into and the world you found on your own.” How does this lesson show up in Williams’s life? Is this a lesson you have learned?
5. Williams writes, “What matters is that I inherited my musical talent from my mother and my writing ability from my father.” What have you gotten from your family that you embrace and carry with you?
6. Williams recounts a moment when, after singing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” her father came up to her and apologized—and it was the first time she realized she had written the song about herself. “It took a poet to show me.” Why do you think she had this blind spot for so long? Can you think of other songs that she mined from her earlier experiences?
7. Williams describes the feeling she had—at only twelve years old—hearing Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited for the first time. Do you have a memory of a song, album, or piece of art that affected you at a young age? What was it?
8. Talk about the influence of Williams’s parents. How did her dad’s life and social circle inform her upbringing? What impact did her mother have?
9. What did Williams find in the blues community that she didn’t in the hippie movement?
10. It seems that there are no set rules about the songwriting process. What do you notice about the way Williams writes?
11. Has reading the memoir changed how you listen to or appreciate Lucinda’s songs?
12. How would you classify Williams’s music? What are the benefits and the drawbacks of not fitting neatly into any particular genre or category? How does that parallel her lived experience?
13. What do Williams’s early life and her work tell us about success in later life? What kind of beliefs or tools does it take to go the distance?