Singer Lucinda Williams reveals plenty of dark secrets in new memoir
nypost.com“Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I told You” (Crown), Williams, 70, reveals this and plenty of other secrets. A singer and songwriter with deep Southern roots — born in the Louisiana city of Lake Charles — her songs tell tales of love, lust and loss, God and the devil.
The most jarring stories in the book are about Williams’ mother, Lucille, who suffered from mental illness.She writes of a time when she was 3 and her mother locked her in a closet, because, her father told her, ‘You were being a typical 3-year-old and crying and she couldn’t handle it.’ “When I think about it now, it sounds so horrible.
How could a mother do that? But there was always my dad there to say, ‘She can’t help it. It’s not her fault. She’s not well.” Much later, her father, the poet and professor Miller Williams, told Lucinda that her mother had been sexually molested by her own father — a Methodist minister — and one or more of her brothers as a child.
Williams relied on her father for care and support, and it was his literary life that had a huge influence on her and her songwriting.
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