The Tell (Oprah's Book Club)

by Amy Griffin

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.

I ran because I was afraid of what I would feel if I sat still.

Denial is not a switch that can be turned off and on. Denial is a glass case that must be shattered before you realize you were trapped inside it in the first place.

The way pressure makes a diamond, I thought that striving for exceptionalism, no matter how burdensome it felt at times, was a virtue. It was my superpower.

Maybe that was just what growing up felt like—to lose that innocence and disinhibition, to replace them with an adult-minded sense of responsibility.

Boys were wolves pursuing their prey; girls should protect their purity until it was torn from them by the force of male lust, not their own desire or agency.

It was a reminder that multiple stories could be true at the same time, that we select our narratives in accordance with how honest we want to be and how honest we can be with ourselves.

“We don’t recognize how much we carry our experiences in our bodies. If something is coming up”—she looked at me—“it has to come out.”

What we don’t always see is how the ambition of high-achieving people can be a trauma response. Sometimes the person who appears to have it together might actually need support.”

“Well, people need to earn our trust. But sometimes these mistakes help us learn things, because not everyone who earns our trust deserves to keep it.”

You can’t have light without the darkness. You have to feel all of it in order to feel any of it.”