Songfacts®:

• Missy Higgins' sixth studio album, The Second Act, finds the Australian singer-songwriter dealing with the aftermath of her divorce and rebuilding her life as a single mother. While the split threw her for a loop, it was even more confusing for her young children. The song "A Complicated Truth" is her attempt to explain the situation. Higgins told Rolling Stone Australia in 2024 how her daughter's questions inspired the tune.
  
  "I was driving around one day with my five-year-old daughter in the back of the car, not long after her dad and I had split up, and she started asking a heap of questions all of a sudden like 'why can't daddy live in our house anymore?' And 'how can you just stop being married if you made promises to each other?'" she explained.
  
  "As you can imagine it felt like a dagger in my heart. I just didn't know what to tell her. So later that night I decided to try and answer her questions in a song. Maybe one day when she listens to it she might understand things a bit better."
  
  In the lyrics, Higgins is alone in her house while her ex-husband has their kids for the night. As she grapples with missing them and worrying over their safety, she attempts to answer her daughter's questions about their new normal, singing:
  
  And all that I can give you are these complicated truths
  Sometimes happiness is the hardest thing to choose
  But I'll always love your daddy, 'cause together we made you
• A big part of Higgins' struggle was letting go of the story she told herself about what her life would look like in a longtime marriage with kids. When that story unexpectedly ended, Higgins felt like a failure as she tried to figure out her Second Act.
  
  "You don't quite realize that your identity is all wrapped up with this egotistical view of where you stand in comparison to other people in society. I didn't realize at the time, but I obviously thought it was superior - I was superior for being able to make my marriage last and keep my family together. And then, now that that hasn't happened, I realized that of course I wasn't superior in any way," she explained in a 2024 Songfacts interview.
  
  "Ultimately, it's not a failure at all when all we're doing is the best we can, but you don't realize these very inherently arrogant thoughts that are so deeply embedded in your identity that you can't see the critical layers. I feel like I've been beaten down after the divorce, and by the Wheel of Time, which is ultimately a good thing. After this whole album run, like a few years after the divorce, I'm starting to talk to myself in a nicer way and get my confidence back. I'm trying to say things and talk to myself in a compassionate way. I wrote this album in the midst of all my shame and disappointment in myself, through depression and disillusionment. The fact that I wrote the album in the middle of that, like deep in the aftermath of that, was the brave thing to do. I don't think in previous years I would have been brave enough to write about it until at least I was in a stronger place."
• The Second Act is Higgins' fourth non-consecutive album to top the Australian albums chart.
• Higgins wrote all the songs for the album by herself and recorded them in a back room of her house. She co-produced the tracks with former Teskey Brothers bassist Brendon Love and Anna Laverty, a songwriter/producer who worked with Amanda Palmer on the 2020 compilation Forty-Five Degrees, which also features a performance by Higgins.