Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club selection is Amy Griffin’s The Tell.
Griffin’s memoir, published today by the Dial Press, tells the story of her reckoning with childhood trauma with the help of MDMA therapy. A critic for Kirkus called the book “an important, wholly believable account of how long-buried but profoundly formative experiences finally emerge.”
Winfrey announced the book’s selection on CBS Mornings, saying, “It’s a memoir about keeping secrets, and how secrets leave you in shame, and how once you are able to open up the aperture of your life experience and reveal that secret, then it’s empowering to you. And I think this book is going to help so many other…people who have suffered any kind of abuse or any kind of shame.”
Griffin appeared alongside Winfrey on the show. Asked about recovering the previously forgotten memories of her abuse, she said, “I think there’s an idea that…secrets…keep you safe, but really, they keep you stuck…I built up these walls and these castles and…moats in my life to [keep] myself safe…but really, it was only in the telling, it was in the sharing of my story, and the processing of what had gone on, and the unraveling of all of it, that I’m able to live the life that I am now.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
