Telling Secrets

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Telling Secrets (memoir)}} Telling Secrets: a memoir (1991), is the third of four partial autobiographies written by Frederick Buechner. Published in 1991, the work considers in depth several scenes and events from the author's life, from his father’s suicide through to his time spent as a visiting professor at Wheaton College. Overview Buechner introduces his third memoir by reflecting on the nature of autobiography. With reference to his first two autobiographical works, The Sacred Journey (1982) and Now and Then (1983), he asks: ‘Are the events I describe anything like the way they really happened? As I look back over them, I think I seen patterns, causal relationships, suggestions of meaning, that I was mostly unaware of at the time. Have I gotten them anything like right?’. These first two memoirs, he continues, ‘dealt mainly with the headlines of my life’. In Telling Secrets, Buechner determines to relate his ‘interior life’, which he likens to the ‘back pages’ of a newspaper: ‘like the back pages’, he writes, ‘it is in the interior where the real news is.’ Buechner begins by meditating on the effects of his father’s suicide in the November of 1936. Concerning the process of grief, the author writes that: ‘His suicide was a secret we nonetheless tried to keep as best we could, and after a while my father himself became a such a secret. There were times when he almost seemed a secret we were trying to keep from each other.’ Twenty-two years after the suicide, Buechner recounts his mother’s ‘fury’ at the ‘brief and fictionalized version’ of the event that he included in his third novel, The Return of Ansel Gibbs (1958). Remembering his mother, the author proceeds to consider his own experience of parenthood, and the traumas of raising children through difficult circumstances, including a brush with anorexia nervosa. Commenting upon the deeply personal nature of Telling Secrets, literary critic Dale Brown reveals that Buechner's original title for the memoir was 'Family Secrets: the life within'.