After sprinkling hints like bread crumbs throughout the book's first few chapters, in which she relates her Texas childhood ("Daddy bragged about me. 'My best boy!' he'd whisper, holding me between his legs ... Hello, Dr. Freud!"), the gossip columnist serves up her big self-scoop. Having divorced her husband after a little more than a year of marriage -- "long enough for me to know it wasn't working for me" -- Smith arrived at the University of Texas to study journalism. She writes:

Then -- bang, something incredible happened. I fell in love. My actress friend Holland Taylor says that falling in love is like being hit by a truck. Well, that was me. I was flat. The only problem was ... the object of my affection was a woman.

What follows is poignant and sad but, given that this was the Bible Belt in the 1940s, not particularly surprising. While Smith says neither she nor her lover "stopped to feel guilty, just a bit confused," the love affair was abruptly aborted when the women's families discovered the steamy mash notes the lovers had secretly been sending each other.

The scandalized families sprang into action and Smith's lover, "shattered by her loss of face with her fine, upstanding, beloved good Christian family," left school without so much as a goodbye, refused to speak with Smith again and quickly married. "In time," Smith writes, "I came to see that as a good pragmatic move."

Her own mother upbraided her for committing "a sin, a blasphemy against nature." Smith felt that if she could just convey "how strong and pure my feelings were, she'd understand. But the more she wept and prayed, the more I saw how useless it was -- hopeless." Her father refused to speak with her for months.

They'd patch things up, but nothing would ever be the same. "I don't believe I ever said an unfettered, open, frank or totally honest word to either of my parents again," she writes. "I told them what they wanted to hear. I was careful with their feelings, their prejudices, their beliefs and value systems."

Slam went the closet door.

Not only did Smith studiously avoid mentioning female lovers to her parents again, she never again acknowledged any to her readers -- or even any interest in women beyond friendship. In fact, she spends pretty much the rest of the book describing all the Hollywood men she has fallen for -- Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty, even Rock Hudson ("I would doodle 'Mrs. Rock Hudson' on the pad by my bed") -- in what seems like a somewhat desperate attempt to minimize the truth she has shared about her college love affair.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"