My daughter turned four this summer, and it’s been a strangely riveting experience watching her grapple with the morality of secrets at this developmental milestone. I repeatedly remind my daughter that she’s “safe to be honest about anything.” When she sees me and my partner quietly conferring in the kitchen or catches us spelling something out so she can’t understand, she’ll yell, “That’s NOT nice, no secrets!” And yet, when her cousin comes over to play, they’ll whisper pure gibberish in each other’s ears and laugh hysterically over their shared “secrets.”

The way secrets can either pull people close or push them away is an enticing paradox. And, looking at my daughter, it’s one that begins early, in toddlerhood. Why do we feel compelled to hide aspects of ourselves? When does withholding blur into misleading? Which secrets do we keep to protect ourselves and which do we keep to shield others? How does keeping a secret uphold (or undermine) our identity, and how does our sense of self shift over time the longer we live with that secret? It makes sense that some of the most psychologically gripping novels, memoirs, and poetry collections center on the creation of secrets, their revelations, and the subsequent fallout.

In my new memoir-in-essays, Freak Lip, each chapter delves into a different period in my life when I wanted to say a particular sentence aloud, but it felt physically impossible to articulate the secret. I hope to offer an honest exploration of the ways shame and anxiety inhibit intimacy, and also a roadmap toward how to risk excavating the truth. The silences formed in the absence of sharing are challenging to capture on the page but when done effectively, readers can become enmeshed in such moments, co-conspirators of the secret. Or, they can be just as blindsided as the other characters when the truth comes out. Here are nine books that guided my understanding of how holding or exposing long-kept secrets creates a palpable tension between regret and relief.

Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

I can’t tell you how badly I needed this book back in the late 1990s—which is the era of Lawlor’s storyline—when I was a teenager and quietly struggling with my own gender expression and anxiety around being diagnosed with a sleeve hymen. I wanted to wear tight baby tees but simultaneously disappear into baggy skater pants and androgynously short hair. I felt like my body was a medical mystery, unknowable to me and impenetrable to anyone else.

In this novel, we dive into the twenty-year-old body and mind of Paul, who has shapeshifting genitals: his active sex life in bathroom stalls and his internal monologue as he tries to understand who he wants to pursue and why. He keeps the truth of his body a secret partly because he doesn’t believe anyone can relate and partly because of his fear of rejection, complicated by the boundaries of his partner’s queer community. The book is a study in the dynamic between loneliness and risk-taking: while each new relationship Paul embraces helps him understand himself better and expands his empathy, he also has to confront what anxiety level is sustainable if he can’t fully reveal his shapeshifting abilities to those who love him. I would have felt less lonely and more emboldened to share what I was going through in high school if I had been able to read a novel like this one.

Amy Long’s Codependence broke my heart like a long-lost song popping on the radio as you speed down the highway that you find yourself suddenly crying and hoarsely shout-singing along to. In this memoir, Long’s secrets are woven into private patterns—obsessively counting pills, visiting different Duane Reade pharmacies—as she documents with dark humor her chronic pain and the opioid addiction attached to the only medication that makes living sustainable.

I grew up with an invisible chronic illness that was a challenge to explain to anyone my own age. I lost friends who didn’t understand that when I felt too tired to even take a shower and had to cancel plans, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to see them. Without a proper diagnosis, I lost months of my life every year to sleeping and fighting bacterial infections. Long exposes how secrecy builds up when even doctors don’t have the language to identify one’s pain. Long’s memoir spans three decades, deftly jumping into memories that track the development of her unrelenting headaches and the divide it creates in her family. How do you tell your mother you’ve gone back on opioids when she was there 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?