Books: "The Tell" By Amy Griffin

 

The Tell: Oprah's Book Club

By Amy Griffin

The Dial Press; hardcover, 288 pages; $29.00

Amy Griffin is the founder of the investment firm G9 Ventures, and she lives in New York City with her husband, John, and their four children.

The Tell is Griffin's exquisite memoir that is an Oprah's Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller, that examines how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing that is possible when we confront our secrets, and begin to tell stories.

The one constant in Amy's life is that she was always running, whether it was through the dirt roads in Amarillo, Texas, growing up; around a track at an Oklahoma high school when she visited her grandparents for Thanksgiving; then on the campus of the University of Virginia, when she was a student athlete.

"I ran in New York City, where I moved after school, along the West Side Highway at night, although I knew it was dangerous," Griffin writes. "After I was married, I ran in Central Park nearly every morning, while the world was still asleep, dawn just breaking over the tree line. Everyone else who was running in the park at that hour had the same furious intensity as I did. We were the dedicated ones, the ones who would make it out for a run under any circumstances, no matter how hard it was raining or snowing."

To an outside observer, it looked like Griffin cultivated the perfect life, but in reality, she was running from something, a secret that she kept hidden from family and friends, and unconsciously, from herself.

One night, Amy's daughter said to her, "You're here, but you're not here. Where are you, Mom?" This set her off on a quest to solve a mystery buried deep in the deep recesses of her own mystery, a journey that took her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and back home to the Texas panhandle, where she grew up.

In this quest for the truth, to attempt to understand and begin to recover from this hidden childhood trauma, Amy interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives many women, asking when they learned to look outside of themselves for validation.

What kind of freedom becomes possible when the whole story is accepted, and one can embrace who they really are? Amy answers that with hope, heart, and relentless honesty, and she points a way forward for everyone, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections, both with ourselves and others.

"This is the story of a secret," Griffin writes. "A secret kept for decades, one I had buried so deep I didn't even know it was there. Many of us carry secrets: things that we were told not to reveal or things we simply couldn't - for fear of judgment or reprisal or, worst of all, for fear that if the people we love found out, they'd see us differently. Sometimes we keep secrets to survive. Then a moment arrives when the usefulness of the secret expires. Keeping it becomes the thing that hurts us. We have to tell.

"When I was little, to tell on someone was a shameful thing: It made you a tattletale. It got somebody in trouble. In telling, you became the problem. Now I understand that the telling is the medicine - not the cause of shame but the thing that heals it.”