Lucinda Williams Explains Why She Chose to Never Have Kids in New Memoir: 'A Burden, Not a Joy' (Exclusive)

It's a sunny April day in New York City, one of the city's first warm days of the season, and Lucinda Williams is basking in the good weather. She's hours out from taking the stage at City Winery for a show, something she's grateful she can still do after a debilitating stroke in 2020.

"I'm just sitting here by the window and the sun's out, and everybody's walking and it's just… it's really nice," she tells PEOPLE.

Williams, 70, is in a stage of life now where such reflection comes often. After decades of fighting tooth and nail to "make it" in an industry that at first paid her no mind, she's settled into a legacy as one of Americana's preeminent songwriters.

With 14 albums under her belt, and a new one on the way in June, she hasn't let setbacks like rampant sexism or her stroke hold her back — and now, she's pulling back the curtain on her long and winding road to stardom in her new memoir, Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, out Tuesday.

"People had been asking me about writing a book for years. I used to say I was nervous about doing it 'cause I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, and I thought maybe I needed to wait 'til I was older or something," says Williams, who took about five years to write the book. "I think I just decided I was brave enough and ready to do it."

The singer-songwriter says there was something "cathartic" about revisiting the highs and lows of her life, which include her complicated relationship with her mother, who suffered from mental illness, a perhaps undeserved reputation as a difficult-to-work-with perfectionist and numerous romances and flirtations, including a surprising fling with controversial singer-songwriter Ryan Adams.

"[Will people see] that I was a pain in the ass? No, that's what my husband would say," she jokes. "The book was a chance to… show everybody what I went through to get to where I am and all of that. My fortitude, how I was able to push myself through all the barriers. It gives you a chance to set the record straight with things, like, here's what actually happened and here's how it was."

Among the things that she hoped to correct the record on in the pages of her memoir was the ways in which she's been misunderstood by the media over the years, starting with a 1997 New York Times article that painted her as a difficult collaborator during the making of her album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

"That whole thing about, I'm a perfectionist and all of that, that was definitely sexist. They don't say the same thing to male musicians. Calling me neurotic and difficult to work with — that's the stuff I'm still trying to live down," she explains. "The bottom line is I released an album that won a Grammy in spite of all the other stuff. So, am I a perfectionist? I don't know, I never thought of myself that way, really. Maybe I am, but maybe I need to be. Is it really that bad of a thing?"

The book will also cover the slow burn that was her rise to fame — not that she's bothered by it.

"I'm not bitter in the least. I'm not. I just don't think in those terms, really, in terms of age and numbers and all that. I think in terms of, 'Wow, look what I've accomplished.' And what difference does it make whether I'm 70 or 30?" she says. "I mean, would it have been nice to have the success that I have at an earlier age? I guess. But at the same time, I've heard horror stories about people who've reached a certain level of success at too young of an age, and then it backfired on them. So maybe it's just as well."

One of the only things not covered by Williams in the memoir is her stroke, though the star says now that she feels "really good" after extensive rehab and physical therapy.

The first step to her new normal was literal — Williams had to learn to walk again. Within five or six months, she had found her singing voice again, though she's still unable to play guitar, which she says has been "kind of a cruel joke that God's played on me or something."

Still, she likens singing and performing to a sort of therapy.

"At the risk of sounding corny, the music is very healing. A lot of people are saying I'm singing better than ever, actually," she says. "The recovery part really takes time. You have to be really patient, and it's not an overnight thing. Sometimes I get impatient with it. I want to be back to my old self before the stroke. But people who've been there from the beginning say I'm doing good, and I feel good. I'm bouncing back pretty well."

In an excerpt from her book shared below, Williams, who married husband Tom Overby in 2009, explains why she chose to never have children. "I thought about that and I thought, 'Oh, I don't know if I wanted to put that there.' Because when I see a baby now, I just go crazy," she says of the passage. "That's why I was worried about what I put in the book about it, because I felt both ways. I'm sure other women have experienced that too, though."

In 1984, when I was thirty-one years old and had moved to Los Angeles, I decided to drive up to San Francisco and among other things I intended to try to find Charles Bukowski. I liked his writing and I had moved to California, so it seemed like a natural thing for me to do. I told my dad about it and he said, "Well, honey, you know that he'll probably try to screw you." Nobody uses that term anymore. How many fathers would say that to their thirty-one-year-old daughter?

When I think back on those days in my late teens and those literary workshops and parties at our house, one thing that comes to mind is that my father was in his forties at the time and [stepmother] Jordan was around twenty-three or twenty-four years old. My dad must have been kind of proud. He's got this young arm candy while he's hosting all these parties for the literati. That's what a lot of those male writers were looking for back then, even if they were married to someone else. Maybe they still do that today.

An aspect of my life that I think was a result of hanging around this wild scene as a teenager is that I had no desire to have my own kids. Never. It wasn't a gut-wrenching decision for me at all and I don't regret it today. I went on birth control at age eighteen and it never occurred to me to become a mother. Not once. When I was growing up, I never saw any families really enjoying their children. I remember thinking as a teenager, "Wow, nobody seems to like having kids. Nobody seems happy having kids. It's a burden, not a joy." It seemed like everybody would rather be partying and f---ing each other freely. Family obligations and responsibilities didn't seem to be the most important thing to anyone, so why should they have been important to me?

Nowadays I look around and sometimes I get depressed when I see pregnant women or parents with young kids because I think, "Is this kid going to have a proper upbringing? Are these kids going to have a good education? Are these kids going to have good parents?" I don't know. I'm not judgmental about it. It's just a feeling about the challenges of parenthood that I first started having in my late teens, based on my own upbringing.

From the book Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams. Copyright © 2023 by Lucinda Williams. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.