The Tell: A Memoir

“From an early age, I was told that I was a natural leader. In some ways, perhaps, it was a birthright: My mother modeled kindness and my father modeled achievement. Leadership, I thought, existed at the crosshairs of these two qualities. There was no higher good than to be good to people. Besides, as I was reminded often, I was very fortunate. I knew to pay it forward. Looking back, I can see that this laid the foundation for the person I would eventually become—a people pleaser, someone who was conditioned to think of others’ needs first and who strove to be perceived as a pillar of virtue within the community.”

Amy’s early leadership potential and her desire to set a good example for others made her vulnerable to abuse and contributed to her compulsion to hide what happened to her. Her tendency to be a people-pleaser and model virtue made it impossible for her to stand up for herself and confess the abuse. Her abuser knew her well and took advantage of these qualities by praising her leadership skills and giving her the attention and validation she craved, then taking advantage of her desire to follow rules and please others, knowing that she wouldn’t tell.

“Why do I remember this so clearly? It wasn’t about the award. The image of my parents’ pride, their joy in me, stayed so vivid in my mind because it was the moment I knew that I was the living fulfillment of their dreams. I was to exemplify their finest qualities. I was supposed to be the brightest—perfect. Memory is a sieve that catches only the most important moments. The insignificant details of daily life don’t stick; instead, they flow through the sieve. Then there are experiences that are unusual, set apart from the everyday, that carry an emotional charge. These we often hold on to, turning them over and over. As I do with this image. The roar of the applause, the tears in my father’s eyes, and me standing onstage. Everyone was looking at me. I should have been so happy. But instead, I felt utterly alone. It was as if the girl they were looking at wasn’t me at all.”

Throughout The Tell, Amy contemplates the nature of memory, wondering why she remembers some things but not others. Before she recalls the specific memories of the abuse that she experienced, she relives a number of memories from her middle school years that are especially vivid for unspecified reasons. Here, for example, she remembers winning an award in middle school, but she cannot understand why the emotion she felt at the time did not match the occasion. Instead of feeling joy and pride, she inexplicably felt alone, as if she did not deserve the award or her parents pride.

“I felt exposed and ashamed. Losing the homecoming queen title confirmed some private, ugly unworthiness that I had been working so hard to keep anyone from seeing. Why hadn’t I won? I had tried so hard to be perfect.”

This passage is another example of the deep unworthiness and shame that Amy’s abuse made her feel. She tried to compensate for this feeling by excelling in all her pursuits, but she lived in constant fear that someone would discover her secret. In the context of this immense psychological burden, a seemingly simple thing like losing the opportunity to be homecoming queen caused Amy to spiral into deep doubts about her own self-worth.

“It was bred into you, between school, church, and southern morality, that a woman was meant to look pretty, take care of the kids, and somehow maintain the appearance of chastity while doing it.”

Here, Amy describes some of the unfair gendered expectations that she internalized as a young girl in rural Texas. Women were held to a high moral standard and were expected to exude an air of grace and purity in order to be highly valued. This culture created a sense of shame around women who didn’t conform to these impossible standards, and the community itself therefore indirectly contributed to the silence that Amy held for so many years after being abused.

“After running so many long distances, I felt I had run into the right arms—of this good man, who treated me as an equal. With John, I felt as though my life could finally begin. I had been chosen, and not by just any man but an extraordinary one—one who was curious and funny and focused, whom the world recognized as successful. He would take care of me, and I of him. Wasn’t that all that had ever been expected of me? The way it had felt to finish the marathon was how it felt to know that I had John, and he had me. Now I could rest.”

In this passage, the motif of running reappears in the form of a figurative “marathon” that Amy has been running ever since the days of her childhood abuse. For the early part of her adult life, Amy believed that having a successful marriage would be an important source of external validation. She relies upon being “chosen” by an “extraordinary” man in order to affirm her own self-worth and broadcast that worth to the rest of the world. With proof of her value by her side in the form of a husband, Amy believes that she can finally slow down and stop her frantic pace of constant achievement.

“You’re nice, but you’re not real. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have you as a mother? You do everything perfectly. You make everything look so easy. How are we supposed to relate to you?”

The strident, accusatory tone of this difficult conversation with Amy’s younger daughter proves to be a major turning point in Amy’s own journey toward recovering her memories. Her daughter’s comments illustrate the fact that Amy’s quest to be “perfect” in life is actually separating her from her family and friends. She has been so occupied with repressing her past and hiding her secrets, even from herself, that she cannot embrace the vulnerability necessary to connect with others on a deep level. Her inability to share her own struggles alienates her from her young daughter, who feels that she can never be as “perfect” as her mother.

“I had indeed been raised to be perfect, but also not to draw attention to the quest for perfection. Perfection must look effortless. Being noticed for it invalidated it. The nuance was subtle but crucial—a distinctly southern twist on an old high standard.”

In this passage, the author explains her complicated relationship with perfection. When she was growing up, women were expected to effortlessly juggle the many responsibilities of domestic life, all while looking impeccable. If someone noticed the work it took to comply with these expectations, the veneer of perfection was revealed to be a mask, not an inherent quality of one’s truest self.

“But the stickiness of the memory wasn’t only because of his pride. It carried such a potent emotional charge and had remained with me all those years, because in that moment, I thought maybe I had been found out.”

Here, the author revisits her memory of winning an award in middle school and sees it with new eyes. For most of her adult life, she assumed that the memory was so clear because she was proud of the recognition that she received. However, there was always an emotional undercurrent that she couldn’t quite place. Now, having recovered the memories of her abuse, Amy realizes that the memory is so clear because she was afraid that others would discover her secret and find her undeserving.

“I do wonder about how your relationships, even beyond the MDMA and your connection to Olivia, may have shaped your readiness to know all of this—to bring the trauma into your awareness, so you could begin the process of healing. You’ve talked about John, but you’ve also mentioned your daughters. How old are they?”

As Amy begins processing the discovery of her repressed memories, her therapist helps her to understand how her relationships and current circumstances have helped her to finally access her past. The safety that Amy felt with John has played a large role in helping her to let her guard down. Furthermore, her daughters are entering their middle school years, the same age that Amy was when she was abused. In this way, they became a “mirror” for Amy, making her young self easier to see.

“We’ve been talking about memory recall, but based on what you’ve told me, it seems pretty clear that your body never forgot. You were physically shaking as you recalled the memories. Think about all the messages your body has been telling you—maybe for years—as you respond to various cues. And your personality never forgot, either—your perfectionism and people-pleasing, your inability to slow down.”

One of the key messages in The Tell is that memory is in the body, away from the conscious mind. Even though Amy couldn’t recall the abuse she experienced in middle school, her body and personality regularly exhibited signs of physical and subconscious memory. Amy’s story suggests that memory is not gone just because it cannot be consciously recalled.

“The strange thing was I found that I wanted to tell people. As much shame as I felt, telling people my story felt like a necessary corrective to the decades of silence. I felt like I needed to say it out loud, to own what had happened to me, no matter how difficult it was.”

As Amy’s story progresses, the significance of the text’s title begins to shift. At the beginning of the author’s narrative, “the tell” refers to the many ways in which her body and personality hint at her traumatic past. However, as she uncovers her memories, she reclaims her story, and the repeated telling becomes a key part of her healing, undoing decades of shame and secrecy.

“And yet it was John with whom I’d gotten so upset because his love made it safe for me to be angry. With all these other men, I couldn’t allow myself the indulgence of my rage. I had cosigned their bad behavior with my southern gentility for too long. Enough was enough.”

Amy’s anger with John illustrates the extent to which her tendency to smile and aim to please is a defense mechanism born out of fear and insecurity. She feels safe with John, so she is able to able to express herself freely. In this passage, Amy begins to understand how this passivity born of fear is part of the reason that a culture of violence against women is allowed to flourish unchecked.

“That evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about the sign as I drifted off to sleep. How hadn’t anyone uncovered what a liar he was? How was he even hired in the first place? And how did he get away with it? Why wasn’t anyone paying attention? I was furious with everyone: parents, teachers, coaches, this so-called community that claimed to put family first. And most of all, I was furious with myself, for having hidden it for so long.”

Amy goes through a period of intense anger toward the adults in her life who missed the signs of abuse and failed to protect her. In this early stage of her healing process, Amy doesn’t yet see how the culture she grew up in created an environment of silence and shame that encouraged people to avoid and ignore the complex or ugly parts of life, allowing Amy’s abuse to go unchecked and unnoticed.

“But I was starting to realize that moving so quickly was how I’d avoided acknowledging what had happened to me. How could I have much to offer my sister emotionally if I was always on the run? For that matter, had I been emotionally available for anyone? I had always prioritized achievement, focusing on the way things looked from the outside and how people saw me. I’d never slowed down enough to think about how things felt.”

Here, Amy realizes that repressing her trauma left her without the emotional resources to maintain deep connections with her friends and family. She was so focused on achievement and external validation that she spent little time focusing on her relationships, and her fear of feeling the negative feelings associated with her trauma left her unable to access other deep emotions as well.

“It was brutal to have these conversations, brutal to recount it to the people who loved me most but hadn’t seen it, but I could feel, as if compelled by forces beyond me, that I had to do it. No matter how ugly the truth was, it was better to be able to examine it under the light than to keep it tucked away in the basement. I had spent so many years hiding that to bare it all was liberating, even as it hurt all of us.”

After years of keeping secrets, Amy understands how the silence harmed her physically, mentally, and emotionally. Even though it is hard to talk about her experiences, she knows that the secrets hurt her more. Her candid tone also normalizes the process of analyzing and sharing stories of abuse in order to heal oneself and connect with other survivors.

“I’d never had a temper before—I always put on a big smile, aiming to please—but lately I had been quick to anger. My fuse had shortened. I didn’t know whom to trust and felt uneasy about handing everything over to another man in the place where it all happened.”

Amy’s new tendency toward anger is a key sign that she is healing. As she shares her story with others, she begins to understand that her value doesn’t hinge on her ability to be accommodating and high-achieving. Her anger, especially toward men, is a sign of reclaiming her power and sense of identity, signaling her refusal to continue perpetuating a culture of silence and looking the other way.

“I had wanted so badly for others to see what had happened to me; I thought that would validate me, in the same way I had always sought external validation. But the confirmation and justice I’d been seeking weren’t things I could get from the outside world. They were things I had to find within myself. In time I realized that where I needed to put my energy was my relationships, and so I had, starting with my family back home in Texas.”

The author stresses the fact that her younger self always sought external validation and subscribed to The Societal Pressures of Perfectionism, and her intense desire to have her memories corroborated and proven is actually an extension of this tendency. However, when she can find no other survivors and her mission to achieve justice fails, Amy has to accept that she cannot always rely on external validation to support her own internal truths. She has to learn to trust herself.

“To anyone back home, calling someone older or wiser than you ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ was simply a sign of good manners. But to me now, the practice epitomized everything about the culture that had made me vulnerable to abuse as a child. A culture ruled by power dynamics; a culture that demanded my obedience, silenced my voice, and guarded my secrets; a culture that told me to do what adults said, no matter what.”

In this passage, Amy meets a young woman from the American South who addresses her as “ma’am,” and the moment reminds her of her own vulnerability when she first moved to New York. Now, however, Amy sees that this seemingly innocuous sign of respect is a symbol of the many ways in which Southern culture has created an environment that allowed her abuse to occur unnoticed and unchallenged.

“‘You are so much more relaxed now than you used to be,’ Gracie told me. ‘Not, like, sit-by-the-pool relaxed, because that will never be you. But I feel like I can tell you anything.’ My edges had softened. Even my militance about the salt and pepper shakers being passed together and clockwise at a dinner table, which any southern belle could tell you was basic common decency, had lessened. The salt would be fine traveling around the table on its own.”

Here, Amy’s daughter comments on the change in Amy’s parenting style after she has recovered her memories. In letting go of her obsession with perfection, Amy becomes gentler and more easygoing. She learns to trust her children more and focus on things that really matter instead of preserving the surface-level image of the perfect family.

“Things had not been perfect. There had been pain, secrecy, and shame. I had suffered in silence. And yet, and yet, and yet.”

When Amy returns home to Texas for the first time since recovering her memories, she is confronted by the complexities and nuances of reality. Although she suffered terrible trauma and abuse during her childhood, she also had many happy, beautiful memories, and these conflicting realities exist simultaneously, in spite of one another, and do not invalidate each other.

“Yes, there was a place for convenience. But not everything needed to sit tidily on a shelf. Some things were messy, difficult, or impossible to contain. Some things defied easy categorization. What happened to me when I was a girl was all of those things. It didn’t fit neatly in a box. But I had to accept it—no matter how inconvenient it was.”

The matter-of-fact tone of this passage relates the idea that Amy spent much of her life denying or ignoring those parts of herself (like her childhood trauma), that didn’t fit into her carefully crafted vision of the perfect life. However, repressing those memories harmed her physically, mentally, and emotionally, and she begins to understand that inward acceptance, not outward perfection, is the key to a fulfilling life.

“There was an essential me that no abuse could ever harm. The me before I felt that I had to be perfect. The me before I felt shame. The me that wanted to be kind, not as a distraction from what was happening to me but simply because it was the purest expression of love I knew. All of that was always within me. That was what I had to remember.”

Throughout the experience of recovering her memories, Amy constantly returns to vivid memories of her classmate Claudia, to whom she once loaned a dress for a school dance. Amy believes these especially vivid memories are trying to tell her something, and she suspects that Claudia was also abused by their teacher. However, after Claudia insists that she did not experience abuse at the hands of Mr. Mason, Amy realizes that the memories are vivid for another reason: they are evidence of her commitment to kindness and generosity. Claudia’s role is not to provide corroboration but to remind Amy who she truly is and help her learn to trust herself.

“She was right. I could see that I had done what I always did: I pushed. The same way I had spent years pushing myself to the limit, whether it was how many miles I could run or how much I could pack into my calendar. I sought validation from outside myself when I wasn’t secure within myself. This was just another example. For all the ways I had managed to “put it down,” there was some part of me that still clung to the belief that someone else would validate my experience and make it all better. This curveball with Claudia had caused me to backslide. But I knew that backsliding had its own lesson to teach me.”

Here, Amy’s therapist helps her understand how her initial attempts to heal from her recovered memories continue to adhere to her need to be perfect and receive external validation. She threw herself into pursuing legal action and searching for other survivors with the same frenetic energy that she applied to the rest of her life. Eventually, she accepted that her story wouldn’t be corroborated and began to move on. However, connecting with Claudia two years later caused Amy to once again become consumed by the need for external validation, reminding her that healing is a complex, nonlinear process.