Secrets I'm Dying to Tell You

by Terry Barr

Secrets I’m Dying to Tell You explores author Terry Barr’s life in Bessemer, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham. The related essays reveal secrets about Bessemer, his family, and some of his most intimate friends and acquaintances, many of whom were victims of abuse. Beginning with his mother’s #MeToo stories, which were the impetus for this CNF collection, Barr began reconsidering the other stories he had heard or read about Bessemer’s dark past—its embrace of the Ku Klux Klan, and its ongoing debilitating relation to Race. He also considered his own family the disloyalty he felt toward some family members because of their recklessness, their selfishness, their way of putting their own desires before the safety and well-being of those they should have been caring for. Finally, the secrets he ends with focus on the last part of his mother’s life and how he tried to reconcile himself to loving and accepting her world, which he discovered was a world that he could still learn from, despite the belief that he was far more progressive than she ever was. Secrets can harm us, and though their revelation hurts, the only way we can heal is through such revelation and admission of our own part in the secret past.“As I have noted before, Terry Barr is the absolute master of the familiar essay. I did not think it possible, but in this, his third collection, he travels further and deeper into his own and his hometown community’s past. Barr is fearless, empathetic, and his relentless interrogation of memory and history results in discoveries that are both joyful and heartbreaking.”—Tim Peeler Author of West of Mercy and The Birdhouse.“In his new collection of essays, Terry Barr examines the ways in which privilege, memory, and pain embed themselves in our cities, our homes, our very bodies. The sense of humor that has earned Barr comparisons to Rick Bragg is still here, but filtered through a more serious lens. ‘That was me, the quiet listener,’ Barr writes, and as we read Secrets I’m Dying to Tell You, we’re listening too, ears and hearts open as we reckon not only with the past, but with our responsibility to a shared future.”—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire.

197 pages, Paperback

Published July 6, 2020

Reviews

[Dean Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful work that is in turned funny, entertaining, a little bit scary and poignant. Terry Barr is one of those writers who just make everything readable.
There are some bonafide historical sides to this writing and while it has the hallmarks of his personal essays, there is an undercurrent of discovering a truth in his home town and playing detective in an area that doesn't want people asking questions.

A natural storyteller Barr takes you on a journey that is both fun, interesting, desterbing and thought provoking. Barr "Tells it like it is" and doesn't whitewash anything. He paints a very real portrait of his family, his friends, his home town and the south itself takes center stage as the main character of his work.
Not just regurgitating facts, Barr has a definate unique prose, that simultanesouly produces bare bones accounts of things that are also simultaneously funny, glorious and often beautiful. Barr is one part David Lynch in his essays, One part Roy Blount, one part John Waters, One part Garrison Keillor, One part John Sayles, and a smidge of Tobias Wolf and Raymond Carver.

Go ahead and buy a copy, your going to be re-reading it a few times and enjoy it again and again.

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Secrets I’m Dying to Tell You is a collection of essays about growing up in Bessemer, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham. Not surprisingly, the essays address societal issues like racism, the Ku Klux Klan, politics, and religion, as well as more personal matters. Following the death of his beloved mother, Barr ponders how his views are different from hers as he looks back on all the things he took for granted growing up in a traditional small southern town—that he can no longer accept. My favorite of the essays is Goin’ Up the Country, about a road trip the author made with his brother and a couple of friends shortly after his mother’s death. Barr hits his stride in this essay with humor and some perfect turns of phrase as he deals with the grief of losing his mother.