On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language". A. Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here".