The Tell: Oprah's Book Club
A Memoir
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4.3 • 493 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our stories
“The Tell encourages us to recognize that sometimes you must understand your own pain to fully experience life’s greatest joys—and Amy’s courage, vulnerability, and insight are a gift to us all.”—Reese Witherspoon, TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2025
“A beautiful account of the journey of courage it takes to face the truth of one’s past.”—Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score
For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?” So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.
In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This memoir left us shook, but in an ultimately positive way. Amy Griffin knew she was an anxious perfectionist who always needed to feel in control, both in her teenage life as a student athlete and later as a financial manager, wife, and mother. What she didn’t know was why. Through therapy that included controlled doses of the psychotropic drug MDMA, Amy recovered a long-repressed memory of sexual abuse from her adolescence in Amarillo, Texas. Despite roadblocks to a legal case against her abuser, she discovered that being able to tell her story—to her family and close friends, but most importantly to herself—helped her come to terms with her anxiety and PTSD. Griffin puts her extremely personal story into a broader cultural context of how and why as many as one in three women are sexually abused. Her clear-eyed discussion of psychedelic drugs (in its street form, MDMA is better known as the club-culture party drug ecstasy) as a serious therapeutic tool is equally eye opening. The Tell is a remarkable memoir.
Customer Reviews
Before She Knew
Amy Griffin unwraps the hidden impacts of childhood sexual abuse. Her journey as an adult to find resolution leads to unexpected discoveries. This is a good read for anyone trying to understand the repercussions of burying trauma.
Wow!
I think the best I can say about this book is that every single human should read it without exception. It’s that good. It’s that important.
Engaging
This was surprisingly good!