The memoir captures a harrowing experience of an obsessive mother hiding from a demon that threatens to reveal itself during therapy

By Jojokhala C. Mei

Amy Griffin’s THE TELL: A MEMOIR is a professional and comfortable New York mother’s surreal, raging, and eventually harrowing first person account of her mind on the run from perfectionism. The result is a taxing, but substantive all-consuming read.

Amy is a middle-aged, graduate, smart wife to successful and devoted John, and they are blessed with two perfect devoted daughters and two sons. Yet she is an obsessive compulsive road runner, who is self-aware enough to sense that this forever thudding of sole-on-tar is odd right form the Prologue’s tender opening salvo in her rural southern conservative USA state of Texas:

‘I ran. I ran in the mornings, and I ran in the afternoons, and I ran at night. …. With no one around, I felt free too, like I’d arrived at a place where nobody could touch me. … I loved being in motion, and I was proud of the mechanics of my body. The sun would set over the mesa turning the sky golden, then blue. The fireflies would come out Bullfrogs croaked in the distance. And I ran.’

This obsession grows even in the big city of New York, until one day her 12-year old daughter gently confronts her: “But we don’t feel like we know who you are.” Gigi said. :You’re nice, but you’re not real.”

Fortunately the therapy route shattered Amy takes rapidly leads to risky and illegal psychedelic MDMA therapy applied by an unqualified practitioner. But if this book wasn’t a memoir, I’d say how Amy discovers MDMA therapy is a cop out. Otherwise, how else could her family hold it together despite her harrowing disintegration when the MDMA Therapy unearths the real demon that she is running away from, and unhinges her mind, despite herself:

‘I knew that eventually I would have to tell my parents, but the thought was intolerable; the same was true of my siblings, particularly my sister Lizzie, with whom I had remained close. My children too, I would need to tell at some point, but how, and when?’

Agony to the point where it is worrisome that Amy may not hold it together up to a point of resolution. But, in a twist Amy pulls the rug from under our feet by questioning that very need for resolution.

You’ll decide for yourself whether not memory can be trusted to protect and simultaneously arm us as people; or whether the perfect ending is possible for us all imperfect humanity. Or perhaps realise that self-compassion may be enough of an achievement: that says – ‘I TURNED AROUND AND walked myself home.’

THE TELL: A MEMOIR, by Amy Griffin. 2025. Penguin Random House. Supplied courtesy of Exclusive Books.