The Tell (Oprah's Book Club)

by Amy Griffin

didn’t do it for anyone else. I did it for me. There is also, I’ve learned, a way that people sometimes respond when I tell them about my experience. They grow tight, zipped up, locked away. “I don’t think I could do anything like that,” they say. “I’m too much of a control freak. And besides, I don’t think I want to know. What if I don’t have the space for it? What if I find out something that I can’t deal with? I don’t have the time to process what comes up on the other end. Why would I want to wallow in the pain?” Or the line I hear the most: “If I don’t remember something, isn’t there a good reason for that?” In these comments, I hear the sound of their tell—the thing that nags at them with gnawed edges, the way it did at me for so long. Olivia laughed when I told her this. “You and I both know those are probably the people who need it the most,” she said. “Just like you did.”