Julia Cohen has a problem with secrets. Her daughter, who turned four this summer, is wrestling with the morality of hiding things, and Cohen watches it happen with a novelist’s eye. She reminds the child that she is “safe to be honest about anything,” and when she catches her parents spelling words so the girl can’t understand them, the child yells, “That’s NOT nice, no secrets!” Yet the same girl whispers nonsense with her cousin and laughs over their shared secrets.
Cohen writes about this in her new memoir-in-essays, Freak Lip, where each chapter deals with a moment in her life when she wanted to say a sentence aloud but couldn’t. She hopes the book offers an honest look at how shame and anxiety hold back intimacy, and a path toward digging up the truth. Now she’s turned to other writers for a list of books about secrets, revelations, and the aftermath.
The list, titled “Revelations, Regret, Relief: Nine Books With Big Secrets,” is a mix of memoir and fiction. It ranges from a novel about a young man with shapeshifting genitals to a memoir about chronic pain and opioid addiction. Cohen recommends Brandon Shimoda, Andrea Lawlor, Amy Long, and Latoya Watkins, among others. The thread tying them together is the tension between keeping a secret and letting it out.
A Shapeshifter’s Secret
Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl follows a twenty-year-old named Paul whose body changes shape, and he keeps the truth hidden partly because he doesn’t believe anyone can relate and partly because of his fear of rejection. His partner’s queer community adds another layer of complication, and the book becomes a study in loneliness versus risk-taking.
Each new relationship helps Paul understand himself better and expands his empathy, but he also has to face what anxiety level is sustainable if he can’t fully reveal his shapeshifting abilities to those who love him. Cohen admits she would have felt less lonely and more emboldened in high school if she could have read a novel like this one.
Pills, Pharmacies, and Headaches
Amy Long’s Codependence is a memoir about chronic pain and the opioid addiction that came with the only medication that made living sustainable. Cohen says it broke her heart like a long-lost song that makes you cry and shout-sing along on the highway. Long’s secrets are woven into private patterns: obsessively counting pills, visiting different Duane Reade pharmacies.
Long grew up with an invisible chronic illness that was hard to explain to anyone her own age. She lost friends who didn’t understand that canceling plans because she felt too tired to take a shower wasn’t because she didn’t want to see them. Doctors couldn’t diagnose her, so she lost months of her life every year to sleeping and fighting bacterial infections.
The memoir spans three decades and jumps through memories of unrelenting headaches. It tracks the divide they created in her family: how do you tell your mother you’ve gone back on opioids when she was feeding you soup and ice cream five years ago during your last withdrawal? How do you tell your father, who thinks it’s the easy way out rather than the only viable choice to survive?
Mothers Who Hide Fathers
Latoya Watkins’ Holler, Child: Stories is a collection of stories centered on Black women in West Texas. Watkins is a master of dialogue, dialect, and narrative intimacy, and her characters’ secrets manifest in different ways. There’s infidelity, the truths mothers tell children to protect them, and the apologies never given.
In both “The Mother” and “Holler, Child,” mothers keep from their sons the identities of their fathers to minimize potential pain and embarrassment, only to see the negative ripple effect this causes. The collection balances familial interactions with internal thoughts, creating local rhythms that draw readers in.
The Memoir That Started It All
Cohen’s own Freak Lip is the starting point for this list. Each chapter explores a different period in her life when she wanted to say a particular sentence aloud but found it physically impossible to articulate the secret. The silences formed in the absence of sharing are challenging to capture on the page, but when done effectively, readers become enmeshed in those moments, co-conspirators of the secret.
Or they can be just as blindsided as the other characters when the truth comes out. Cohen hopes the book offers an honest exploration of how shame and anxiety inhibit intimacy, and a roadmap toward risking excavation of the truth.
The Tension Between Regret and Relief
Cohen’s daughter yells about secrets because she takes them seriously. The list is a reminder that secrets have consequences, and those consequences are often mixed. Keeping a secret can bring relief, but it can also create regret. Revealing a secret can bring relief, but it can also bring regret.
The books Cohen recommends explore both sides of that equation. They show how secrets form, why people keep them, and what happens when they finally come out. Cohen’s own memoir does the same work, and her list points readers toward other writers who have done it well.
Key Facts Box
- Title: Revelations, Regret, Relief: Nine Books With Big Secrets
- Author: Julia Cohen
- Recommended authors: Brandon Shimoda, Andrea Lawlor, Amy Long, Latoya Watkins
- Cohen’s own work: Freak Lip (memoir-in-essays)
- Lawlor’s novel: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
- Long’s memoir: Codependence
- Watkins’ collection: Holler, Child: Stories
The list is a reading guide filtered through one writer’s obsessions. It’s a reminder that secrets are universal, and that literature has always been a way to think about them. Cohen’s daughter is still learning the rules, and the books on this list are for anyone who has ever tried to break them.
Source material: “Revelations, Regret, Relief: Nine Books With Big Secrets,” Literary Hub.
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