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      Book Review: ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,’ by Lucinda Williams

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      In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” the raw-voiced singer looks back on a contentious artistic life.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir, by Lucinda WilliamsLucinda Williams, the Grammy-winning 70-year-old songwriter, was born in Lake Charles, La. Her grandfathers were both preachers; one was a civil rights advocate. Her father, Miller Williams, was an award-winning poet. Her mother loved music and played the piano. Williams grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Utah, Chile and Mexico. On paper, it was an ideal upbringing for the artist she became: a nomadic touring musician whose songs draw on deep Southern roots, using matter-of-fact imagery to conjure tempestuous emotions.But her pedigree didn’t make her life fall neatly into place, as Williams recalls in her memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.” “I’ve held back from talking about my childhood over the decades of my life,” she notes. “I’ve written songs about it instead.” Williams’s mother was sexually abused as a child, she writes, and lived with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Her poet-professor father was a mentor and protector, but he also had a temper. Williams’s parents divorced after her father took up with one of his teenage students.In the title song of her best-selling album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Williams sings about being a “Child in the back seat ’bout four or five years/Lookin’ out the window, little bit of dirt mixed with tears.” When her father first heard it, he told Williams that she was that crying little girl; until then, Williams hadn’t realized she was writing about herself. Williams’s memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs. She reveals the autobiographical underpinnings of some of her darkest lyrics, but she also tells a larger tale: of artistic determination battling personal insecurity; of misjudging and being misjudged by men and by the music business; and of steadfastly holding her own.She doesn’t give in: not on a trendy remix, not on her album cover photos, not on her instincts. She can handle being called difficult or “insane” even though, she admits, “There are times when I can bring an extra layer of unpredictable emotion to a situation that is already tough to begin with.” The lasting results are in her songs.Williams envisioned life as a musician soon after she picked up a guitar. She started performing folk songs in her teens. But even as she honed her own songwriting and built local reputations — in Texas and then in Los Angeles — she worked day jobs well into her 30s. Major labels rejected her, again and again, as being “too country for rock” but “too rock for country.”From the beginning — two low-budget Folkways albums she made in 1979 and 1980 — Williams sang about elemental subjects: desire, sorrow, love, traveling, survival, death. Some of her songs are kiss-offs; some offer regrets; some are elegies; some are takedowns. They’re always grounded in homely details. In “Hot Blood,” a bluesy outpouring of female lust, she sings about feeling “a cold chill” as she watches a guy just “fixin’ your flat with a tire iron.”It took an English punk label, Rough Trade, to release “Lucinda Williams,” her 1988 breakthrough album. A decade later, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” marked her commercial peak. But recording that album, she recalls in the memoir, was lengthy and fraught. Making records, she writes, “can test the limits and boundaries of everyone involved. I now understand that is normal.” Getting the sound Williams wanted on “Car Wheels” led to the breakup of her longtime band and clashes with two producers. Then contractual tangles delayed the release of the finished album for two years. Williams also nixed a video concept from the director Paul Schrader, deciding, “He was just another guy trying to impose his vision on a female artist. ‘Car Wheels’ did fine without a video.”Throughout her book, Williams recognizes her own appetites and mistakes. She writes about suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and bouts of depression, and she recognizes her weakness for the kind of boyfriend she calls “a poet on a motorcycle,” guys who often turned out to be cheaters, addicts or worse.She came through anyway. “That relationship was done, but I got a good song out of it,” she writes about one romantic debacle. Williams has been married since 2009 to her manager, producer and songwriting collaborator, Tom Overby.Although Williams finished her book in 2022, it doesn’t mention her 2020 stroke; she can no longer play guitar. But she returned to touring in 2021 and persists in writing songs; she’s releasing a new album in June. Her memoir shows how deep that grit runs.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir | By Lucinda Williams | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Crown | $28 More

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      in Movies

      ‘Judy Blume Forever’ Review: The Y.A. Author Who Went There First

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      The documentary, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, features Blume narrating the milestones of her life and career, along with interviews of her famous fans.There are few living children’s authors who have connected as deeply to their readers as Judy Blume. That’s the argument of “Judy Blume Forever,” a new documentary from Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok that pays unwavering tribute to Blume and her imprint on young adult literature. The film, streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Friday, features the 85-year-old writer narrating the major milestones of her life and career, cut together with interviews of famous Blume acolytes such as the writer and director Lena Dunham, the comedian Samantha Bee, the writer Jacqueline Woodson and Anna Konkle, the co-creator of “PEN15.”Since the publication of her breakthrough novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” in 1970, while she was a young housewife in suburban New Jersey, Blume has maintained a fiercely devoted audience that has found enlightenment and understanding through her preteen and teenage characters. It’s not uncommon to hear fans of Blume’s work say that reading her books felt as though she was speaking directly to them through the pages. This is thanks, in no small part, to her frank discussion of mature themes that, at the time she was writing, were considered unusual for what we now call Y.A. novels: adolescent sexuality, religion, disability, bullying, and — in many of her books — the unfair expectations of purity and obedience that parents and society place on children.“Judy Blume Forever” does a fine job of synthesizing the influences that Blume’s life had on her writing — in particular her father’s death when she was 21, as well as the marriage and divorce that inspired her first adult-oriented novel, “Wifey.” Blume, a longtime free-speech advocate, also has no qualms about drawing parallels between the Reagan-era book censorship campaigns she endured and the hundreds of attempts to ban books in just the past year.In a successful showcase of what might be lost if Blume’s books were removed from libraries and schools, the film returns to one of the most compelling aspects of career: her correspondence with thousands of children, whose letters to her span 50 years and are now archived at Yale. Pardo and Wolchok interview two of Blume’s pen pals, now adults themselves, and their recounting of her impact on their lives encompasses some of the film’s most moving portions.At times, “Judy Blume Forever” can resemble a highlight reel of Blume’s bibliography, with large sections dedicated to her books’ most memorable excerpts, such as the masturbation sequence in “Deenie.” Given her vast literary output, it’s hard to give complex stories like “Blubber” and “Forever” the nuance they deserve in a short documentary, especially one this preoccupied with showing Judy Blume the person, jogging on the beach and owning a small bookstore in Key West. Compared with her most obvious predecessor, Maurice Sendak, who led an intensely private life, Blume has always been an open book, despite the flurry of controversy around her. That may not make for the most exciting documentary, but it does make Blume herself even more endearing.Judy Blume ForeverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      in Music

      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More

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      in Television

      Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

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      Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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      A Dancer’s Life: Chita Rivera on Working Hard and Learning From the Best

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      In her new memoir, Chita Rivera says she could never relate to the song “I’m Still Here,” Stephen Sondheim’s beloved ode to persevering despite the odds. She liked the song just fine, but, as a nose-to-the-grindstone professional, there was no time for nostalgia — she was always looking ahead to the next gig. Then the pandemic arrived and, “like the rest of the world, there I was.”Even when the pandemic presented her with an occasion to hit pause, her urge to look back was borne out of a desire to pay it forward. “I really wanted a memoir that kids could read and apply themselves to,” Rivera, 90, said over tea last month at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.”“Chita: A Memoir,” written with the journalist Patrick Pacheco and available on April 25, traces the three-time Tony Award winner’s life with a veteran’s clarity and insouciance. Over its 320 pages, the Puerto Rican-American performer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., fondly recalls her early dance classes, her move to New York City to study at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, her breakthrough as Anita in “West Side Story” and her continued success on Broadway (18 appearances total) and beyond.Chita Rivera, right, and Liane Plane in a scene from the Broadway production of “West Side Story.”Hank Walker/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockUpon reflecting on all she learned from the likes of Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, Rivera, who had long been approached about writing a memoir, decided finally to tell her story. She’s no stranger to sharing her experiences and playing mentor. The actress Laura Benanti, with whom Rivera starred in the 2003 Broadway revival of “Nine,” said in a phone interview that Rivera’s generosity during the production was almost maternal.“She makes you feel immediately part of a team,” Benanti said. “She’s not just out there for herself. She taught me that you’re only as good as the person you’re playing opposite, so you want everybody to thrive.”The book also delves into Rivera’s fruitful collaborations with the composer John Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb. Their “triumvirate,” as Kander described it over the phone, led to her Tony-nominated performances as the publicity-hungry murderess Velma Kelly in “Chicago”; Anna, the roller-skating rink owner who makes amends with her daughter, in “The Rink”; and Aurora, the object of a gay prisoner’s diva worship, in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” She often joined the national or international tours of those productions, which deepened Rivera’s ties to her best-known roles.Kander called her a composer’s blessing. “When you hear Chita, you see Chita. When you work with somebody like that, their range is so enormous that there’s nothing you can’t write,” he said of developing characters with Rivera. “It’s a spirit that I hear. If there’s a natural feeling when you imagine Chita singing it, then you’re on the right track.”Rivera, with her sharp, sensuous agility, has been a regular stage presence, from her professional debut in 1952 as a featured dancer in the national tour of “Call Me Madam” to her final Broadway bow in 2015 for “The Visit,” another collaboration with Kander and Ebb (and their frequent book writer Terrence McNally). She’s never gone more than three years without a major, regional or touring production — even when raising her daughter with Tony Mordente, Lisa, though her birth did delay the London premiere of “West Side Story” — and she continues to perform her cabaret act. This constant work is all she knows, Rivera said, though it has left her with a slight blind spot when it comes to the business she so loves.“Whenever you hear that vamp, you think of ‘Jazz,’” she said.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times“Who sang ‘Jazz’? I did.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesShe first saw her friend Fosse’s 1978 revue, “Dancin’,” for example, when it was revived on Broadway this spring. “I didn’t have much time to see the shows,” she said. “That’s how the golden age was for me: one show after another, one fabulous lyricist after another fabulous composer, all growing up at the same time. It was great for me because I learned constantly.”The “Dancin’” revival, directed by one of the original cast members, Wayne Cilento, reminded her of her heyday. “Because it’s full of fabulous dancers that work really hard, and that’s all they do, is dance.”To help her revisit that time for the memoir, Rivera turned to Pacheco, whom she met in 1975 while he was writing about her nightclub act at the Grand Finale cabaret for the entertainment magazine After Dark. They also got together over cosmopolitans in 2005, when Pacheco interviewed her at length; his notes shaped McNally’s book for her solo Broadway show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.”Rivera first worked with Patrick Pacheco almost two decades ago, when he interviewed her as part of the development process for her 2005 show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” above.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“He’s funny, he likes the spirit to be uplifted, and he found me amusing,” Rivera said. Pacheco later added that the two bonded over being Latino and Catholic — “a key to her personality,” he said. Interviews for the memoir began in the summer of 2020, from her home in Rockland County, N.Y., originally as informal conversations. They pitched it to publishers once a narrative structure came together.“I don’t think she would have ever done it if Covid hadn’t come around,” Pacheco said, “because she is unstoppable when it comes to her career. That’s what she really lives for — to be on that stage.”“She was less enthusiastic about revealing her private life,” Pacheco continued, noting her reluctance to discuss her romance with Sammy Davis Jr. “But she really was a good sport. Once we read a chapter together, she rarely asked for any changes. I would say, in 100,000 words if she asked me to delete 50, that would be major.”Those seeking gossip might be disappointed, though. Aside from some light naughtiness when describing her love affairs and weakness for Italian men, the book’s juiciest disclosure might be that Rivera turned down the playwright Arthur Laurents’s request to star as Rose in the London premiere of “Gypsy” in the early 1960s.In her 30s at the time, Rivera writes she felt she was too young, polite and distant from her inner “renegade” to play an overbearing stage mother. That renegade emerges in the book as her alter ego, Dolores. (Rivera was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson.) Whereas Chita is the sweet one “who tries to bring everything together, solve problems and likes to laugh,” she said, Dolores doesn’t hold back, and gets her jobs. “She was the one that protected me,” she said. “Thanks to Patrick, we brought her out.”“I feel that you can’t replace the person that originates a role,” Rivera said of being replaced in the film versions of “West Side Story” and “Chicago.” Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThese personas sit atop her shoulders, Rivera said, battling it out like a Boricua Jekyll and Hyde. When mulling over replacing her friend Gwen Verdon in the title role of “Sweet Charity” for its national tour, she remembered, “The two angels on my shoulders were saying, ‘You can’t.’ ‘Well, yes, you can — if you bring your own shoes.’”It is Dolores who provides the bulk of the book’s snarky wit and shrugs off being passed over for film adaptations, though she originated the characters onstage. “They’re always winning Oscars for roles that I’ve done, but that’s cool,” Rivera said with a confident smirk, referring to a comment in the book about Rita Moreno’s and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s wins for “West Side Story” and “Chicago.”“I feel that you can’t replace the person that originates a role,” she continued. “I say in my act: ‘Catherine, you keep your Oscar, I’ll keep my vamp.’ And it’s a great vamp. I would hold it as long as the first two rows would let me.”She recalled the vamp — Kander’s introduction to “All That Jazz” from “Chicago,” a seductive eight-count that can be teased out forever — and how, when performing that signature number, she would glare at the audience and “just pulse.”“Whenever you hear that vamp, you think of ‘Jazz,’” she said, tapping her fingers like a drumroll. “And who sang ‘Jazz’? I did.” More

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      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘Honey, Baby, Mine,’ by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

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      Laura Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd, both made careers in the movies. In “Honey, Baby, Mine,” they drop names, rehash arguments and lean on each other.HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding), by Laura Dern and Diane LaddWhen Diane Ladd is diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given six months to live, her daughter Laura Dern looks at her and thinks, “You can’t die.” Determined to increase her mother’s lung capacity and life span, Dern gets the doctor’s permission to take Ladd on daily 15-minute walks, distracting her mother by asking questions about the past.Transcripts of those conversations are the beating heart of “Honey, Baby, Mine,” the actresses’ joint memoir, which also includes photographs, recipes, memorabilia and short, interspersed chapters written by each woman.They commiserate over the timeless frustrations of their industry, while also reflecting on what has slowly changed. Dern recalls visiting her mom’s sets as a child, catching the acting bug when Martin Scorsese asked her to appear as an extra in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Allowing a child on the set was still frowned upon nearly two decades later, when they worked together on “Rambling Rose” (for which they became the only mother-daughter pair ever to have been nominated for Academy Awards for the same film) ‌and had to advocate for their director to be allowed to nurse her baby at work.By the time Dern co-starred in the 2017 TV mini-series “Big Little Lies,” actors’ children were so commonly present that, she writes, “we had effectively created a … day care.” Along the way, they toss about glittery names, among them Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Shelley Winters, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon (who also provides the foreword). If you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty — but that’s not what lingers most after the telling.As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges.At first it seems a bit repetitive. Mother and daughter reminisce, joke and bicker, circling back to the same topics: the craft of acting, the strange experience of fame, the infinite doubts and compromises of motherhood.On one walk-and-talk, they tell funny anecdotes about Ladd’s mother, “Grandma Mary,” a wisecracking Mississippi divorcée who assisted with Dern’s upbringing after Ladd divorced Dern’s father, the actor Bruce Dern. Mary defied her era’s Southern Belle stereotypes, rejecting racism and classism in favor of everyday advocacy for equality. Her daughter and granddaughter learned a lot about independence from her, they agree.Then the tone shifts. On a later walk, Dern admits that she often resented being left with her grandmother while Ladd was away for work. A suddenly emotional Ladd says she sometimes felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of supporting not only her daughter but her mother, “working 12-hour days making the money to pay the rent, buy her clothes, put food in her mouth for her to go get entertained and travel and play with you.” Emboldened by each day’s revelations and driven by their abiding love for each other, they wade into deeper confessions. The book is at its most memorable and affecting when they work up the courage to excavate heavy, sharp-edged emotional artifacts.Neither has forgotten the time Ladd slapped a teenage Dern in the kitchen of their home, though each remembers the moment differently. They reopen a bitter argument about the time Ladd took Dern’s young son for a significant haircut without her permission; neither party is ready to back down, still. They revisit the time Dern, racked with grief over her divorce from the musician Ben Harper, yelled, “You have no idea what I’m feeling right now!” and upended a sofa — and how her mother responded by making tea and reminding her that her scoliosis made it unwise to lift such heavy things. Eventually they confront Ladd’s greatest pain, a nearly unendurable loss she experienced as a young mother. They yell, grow quiet, accuse and forgive, allowing us to witness their relationship evolving, walk by walk. Ladd’s health improves. Dern draws even closer to her mother. For them, the experiment proves successful. For readers, it may depend on what we come for. I recommend going into “Honey, Baby, Mine” curious about the origin stories, separate and intertwined, of two prolific artists who pushed through private challenges — are pushing through still — while forging lives in the public eye.Mary Laura Philpott is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives.”HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding) | By Laura Dern and Diane Ladd | Illustrated | 256 pp. | Grand Central Publishing | $32 More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Chita: A Memoir,’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco

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      Her new memoir finds the 90-year-old singer-dancer hungry for acclaim, but generous to others on her way to getting it.CHITA: A Memoir, by Chita Rivera with Patrick PachecoHow did Chita Rivera feel when she saw Rita Moreno, another actress of Puerto Rican descent, in the movie role of Anita that Rivera had originated on Broadway in “West Side Story”?“How dare she?” she recalls thinking in “Chita,” her playful and history-rich memoir. “That is my dress, that is my earring!” The truth is she was already kicking it up with Dick Van Dyke on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time. So she got over it. Then, when that show became a movie, Janet Leigh took Rivera’s part of Rosie, even after Rivera killed with “Spanish Rose,” her stereotype-bashing number, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” (Look it up on YouTube, you won’t be sorry.)Years later the steamy role of Velma Kelly that she originated in “Chicago” for Bob Fosse went to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for it. “She’s the perfect choice,” she responded when Rob Marshall, its director, checked in.Cutthroat as the acting game may be, and even harder for talent with Hispanic names long before J. Lo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rosie Perez and Daphne Rubin-Vega hit the scene, Rivera comes off as thirsty for recognition — but not bloodthirsty — despite the urgings of her colleagues Gwen Verdon, Fred Ebb and others to up her diva game.She occasionally takes a satisfying swipe (Paul Lynde gets a dressing-down for being nasty and so does John Lennon, of all people, when she appeared with the Beatles in 1964). But most everyone else gets a pass, including Tony Mordente, her first husband, a dancer whom she met in “West Side Story”; Lisa Mordente, their daughter; and the many loves of her life that she recalls with generosity — the restaurateur Joe Allen and Sammy Davis Jr., among them.“There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” Davis once told her. It took some time for Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to understand that. A tomboy born in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., by a poised mother of mixed ancestry who worked for the Defense Department and a dapper Puerto Rican musician father who died when she was little, Rivera got a scholarship to the School of American Ballet when she was 16. She moved in with relatives in the Bronx and describes a heady time of bodegas, subways, public school and intimidating ballet instructors. Overcoming her fear of singing, she got into the national tour of “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch, then on Broadway in “Guys and Dolls” and “Can-Can,” starring Verdon. With “West Side Story,” her career took off.Broadway-loving readers will appreciate the play-by-play (pun intended) of this fizzy book, written in collaboration with Patrick Pacheco, a theater-savvy journalist and TV host. It doesn’t take much to make the pages fly when you have a scene of Stritch in rehearsals with Rivera, “blowing” on the Scotch in her coffee cup, or a pre-rehab Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink.” Essentially a good girl, despite her insistence that she has a fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores (who occasionally makes herself heard in the book), at 90, this national icon doesn’t seem to want to burn many bridges. If roles or songs were taken from her and given to others, all for the best. She doesn’t get too political either, although she does unload about what it means to play Latina characters “subjected to racist taunts,” and on her defining early role as a street-sassy Puerto Rican. When Rivera was suggested for “1491,” one of his lesser-known shows, Meredith Willson, who wrote “The Music Man,” asked, “Doesn’t she speak with an accent?” She allows that while she bumped into ethnic stereotypes, the theater world was more relaxed than Hollywood. “I wanted to be considered for a range of roles and for the most part I succeeded,” she writes.One role she never played, this upbeat memoir makes clear — the victim.Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to The Times and the author of “Assisted Loving” and “Bobby Wonderful.”CHITA: A Memoir | By Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Harper One | $27.99 More

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      Stephen Hough Revisits His Youth, in Playful Fragments

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      In his new memoir, “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” Stephen Hough recalls his artistic and sexual coming-of-age with a light touch.On the cover of the book “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” out this week from Faber & Faber, a young Stephen Hough sits at the piano, wearing a velvet jacket stitched with sequins and fake pearls. He’s dressed as Liberace.“Obviously, there’s a gay subtext to that costume,” Hough said in a recent video interview. “Even then, I loved the outrageousness of it, even though I was quite shy.” There’s a hint of subversion, something Hough maintains today with a twinkle permanently in his eye.Hough, an English pianist and composer, has carried his lifelong love of creative writing into two previous books: “Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More,” and a novel, “The Final Retreat.” Where Hough described his novel as “Sibelian” in form, “Enough,” a collection of vignettes on childhood and Hough’s troubled adolescence, is, in his words, more Debussyan: “In the ‘Préludes,’ the way he writes the piece titles at the end of the preludes, not at the beginning, with dots — I love this idea of hinting at things, suggesting things.”Playful suggestion abounds in Hough’s memoir, from the cover onward. (The first part of the title is a play on his regularly mispronounced surname, the second on Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.”) “I do like shocking people, and I think that’s part of what keeps me onstage,” he said.The critic Alexandra Coghlan said that there is a lightness of touch in both Hough’s playing and writing, “allowing him to explore some big topics on the page — his Catholic faith, his homosexuality, life as an artist — without becoming po-faced or preachy.” Among stories of “chucky” eggs (boiled hard, then mashed with seasoning) and his family’s tenuous Beatles connection, Hough recalls the time, at age 4, when he inserted his third finger up a neighborhood boy’s rectum. “Later, I would use it to trill long at the top of the keyboard in the Liszt First Concerto,” he writes, nonchalantly.Despite a scrapbook style, “Enough” retains a loose chronology, beginning with his family’s first piano, a “pretty bad one” with yellowed keys and a rosewood frame, bought for £5 in an antique shop near his home, in an area between Liverpool and Manchester; and ending after the Hough won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, at 21.In lieu of descriptions of pianos he’s loved — “It’s like meeting someone on holiday and having a romance: You know that you can’t see them again so best not to be too involved,” he said — Hough focuses on relationships with family and teachers, and an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Hough performing with the New York Philharmonic in 2019. In his memoir, he describes an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHough’s writing is deeply sensual, “because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,” he said. The post-World War II period that saw colorful developments in art and music — he turned to David Bowie and Marc Bolan in his teens — coincided, in Hough’s world at least, with “horrible food”: his grandmother’s “desiccated baking,” or overboiled sprouts that “looked like comatose slugs.” That peculiarly British trait of blandness, Hough said, “comes right through from the Victorian suspicion of pleasure.”“Only in our literature have we allowed ourselves to enjoy words in a sensual way,” he added. “You think of the great poets right through the era, that’s the only place where we have let go of the tight corsets and collars.”Before he had any idea of the concept, Hough knew that he was gay. Later, he learned what the word “homosexual” meant: “I thought, ‘How disgusting is that!’ And then two seconds later, I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me!’”His adolescence was full with contradictions about sexuality, particularly as he converted to Catholicism. Later, his route to self-acceptance came through celibacy. A busy professional life after his Naumberg win helped distract him, though he was tormented by the constant possibility of guilt — mainly through unconscious thoughts, like sex dreams. “This was my scrupulous theological line on overdrive, really,” he said, ”but it was distressing, I have to say, many times in my life.”Hough’s parents — loving of him, but not especially of each other — contained similar conflicting multitudes. His father, a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, was anti-Europe but not aligned with the political right’s position on the issue, was prudish and chivalrous around women yet also a serial adulterer. “He was just outside of every box that you could imagine,” Hough said, “in the most interesting way.”His mother was irrepressible. Despite saying that she was solely attracted to men before her death, “there were so many clues along the way,” Hough said. “Maybe she was part of a kind of sexual fluidity before it was known as that; maybe she enjoyed physical affection with women without feeling the need to say, ‘I’m a lesbian.’”At 10, Hough enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. What followed was a dark period for him (he suffered a nervous breakdown) and the school (some of his teachers would later go to prison for child abuse), before he moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, where “something sparked into life.”Three life-changing moments came in a short period: the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year competition; his first Catholic Mass; and his discovery of Edward Elgar’s setting of the John Henry Newman poem “The Dream of Gerontius.”“It turned me around in every way: musically, religiously, personally,” Hough said of the Elgar. “You can taste it really: that era of late Victorian camp, high-church life.”Hough had been interested in composing, but was forced to stop studying it as he focused on piano while at the Royal Northern College of Music. (John Corigliano encouraged him to restart in the 1990s.) In contrast to his many piano teachers — including “Miss Felicity Riley,” an orange-lipped teacher from the next village, the avuncular Gordon Green and the fearsome Adele Marcus — Hough didn’t feel the need to return to composition lessons.“I think it’s a little bit like writing words,” he said. “I don’t think Henry James had creative writing lessons, but he read and he knew the grammar, and so he set off on a journey with it.” That method — of writing music by absorbing musical grammar — informs his compositions, which “are always felicitous, viz., most recently his delicately allusive first string quartet,” the music critic Michael Church wrote in an email, referring to “Les Six Recontres” (2021), which evokes flavors of the French neo-Classical set Les Six.“Enough” concludes in New York: Hough gained a scholarship to the Juilliard School, and fell in love with a city slowly coming to terms with what would become the AIDS crisis.“As the 1980s moved on, it was like a cloud in the sky on a sunny day,” Hough said. “Gradually it began to be darker and darker, and this extraordinary life of clubbing, fun and parties became very different in flavor.”But while the book ends with Hough’s life in turmoil, there’s one final suggestion: that better things are coming. 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