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.’ 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. The memoir also includes reflections on the differing pluralistic and Evangelical cultures Buechner experienced while lecturing at
Harvard Divinity School and
Wheaton College, and his recollection of the process of writing his eleventh novel,
Brendan (1987). == Themes ==