It would be easy to think you knew everything about Amy Griffin. She’s the founder of G9 Ventures and has been an early-stage investor in Goop and On Running, and worked on the Bumble IPO and Blackstone’s purchase of Hello Sunshine, the media group started by Reese Witherspoon. Her friendships with Gwyneth Paltrow and Sara Blakely are famous, and she lives in New York City with her husband and four photogenic kids.
What she hasn’t talked about is the fact that a young overachieving girl in West Texas she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her teacher. It’s a secret she hid even from herself for decades and one that she shares in her new book. The Tell isn’t a book about trauma, it’s an investigation of what happened to Griffin and of the ways that the pressure to achieve perfection damages girls and women. Griffin spoke to ELLE.com about the years she spent trying to get legal justice, accessing repressed memories, and why she was never going to write a business book.
Griffin with her husband and children.
Your career isn’t a huge part of the book, which I found surprising. Was that a conscious decision?
I was called over five years ago now by a woman who’s now my literary agent, and she said, “Amy, will you please write a book about women in business?” My response in that moment was, “There are so many more people who are far more qualified in business to write a story about women in business.” Right away I said to her, “I have a story that I think might reach women in a different way.” Over time, I’ve really come to realize I’m the sum of all my parts. The decision for me was that talking about business deals, as important as they were, felt so secondary to me in terms of what I was processing.
I think a lot of women feel a pressure to share private things to get noticed as a writer. There’s something that comes from telling the story because it’s the right time to tell it, because you want to, because it’s important, and not because you’ve been told that that’s the only value your voice has.
I had 150,000 words that I’d been writing on my bathroom floor and in my closet, and I had no intention that anyone in the world would ever read a word. So for me, when I decided to publish it, and I recognized, “Wait, why am I doing this? I need to do this. I must do this. I’ve got to step forward.” The beauty of it is that I didn’t know that anyone in the world would see this, but it felt like the most honest story to share.
Griffin as a little girl.
How did you gauge what you wanted to share versus what you might want to leave out? And was there a conversation that you had with your husband and your children?
[The book] was written, and so what I had to go back and do is have the really open, honest conversations with the people in my life, which is really what I see the book being about. I really said so many times over, “This book is not a trauma book.” Because I don’t want people to read it for the theme of, “Oh my gosh, I get to hear someone else’s trauma.” Instead, the writing is about the telling, which is the processing.
I can’t even tell you how many times the word that I love using now, which is consent, has been used with the people in my life. I’ve had to go to my children, I’ve had to go to my husband and say, “How do you feel about these particular moments in our life? How would it affect you if I tell this story publicly?”
Sometimes it was so difficult to even remember those conversations because I was so startled and it was so shocking that there was a disassociation I feel even in some of the telling. I was so scared that the things that I had remembered from so long ago and the things that I was sharing would go away. I would go back, and I would write down, I was drinking a Starbucks coffee. I had half and half in it in this moment. I was placing myself wearing my sneakers. I wrote down every detail.
Griffin with her daughters.
Do you think about why it was so been so hard to access your memories?
This is the thing that I think about all the time. I’ve been trying to understand that for the better part of five years. The way that we all try to be that perfect mother or perfect daughter or perfect student, I wanted to be the perfect survivor and have perfect answers. I was told [by my abuser] that I wouldn’t be believed. I was told I wouldn’t be loved if I told. I’ve actually learned over time to thank myself and show myself compassion for not telling, because that was the only way I knew how to survive. So rather than me questioning myself, I’ve learned to accept that part of me.
How did you make the decision to pursue this legally?
I was going to do the right thing, which it never dawned on me could be anything other than holding this person accountable, but going down every possible avenue to be Olivia Pope, Olivia Benson, to have the perfect ending.
The most important thing to me was that this person could not do this to anyone else. That felt like validation to me. But to hold him accountable would mean that I was going to be the perfect survivor. In many ways, there were moments of me feeling like, “Oh, I’m a failure because no matter how hard I tried to make things right by holding this person accountable, I couldn’t do it.” But what I realized was that that wasn’t going to heal me anyway. What I needed to do was go investigate me, take care of me, and [think] how I could actually help myself?
Were there things that helped you during this really difficult period of trying to get this case tried?
In some ways, the pursuit of legal justice was very, very destabilizing and difficult to deal with. That’s where the writing was what saved my life. It helped me connect all those moments in my life when things came up. It helped me to let go of the shame and the control that I had around the situation.
It’s been so validating to have people come back to me and say, “Oh, I realize in just going to tell one other person what I’ve gone through, there’s so much more connectedness.” And in terms of trying to be perfect and showing that I’m perfect and always in control, it actually created so much vulnerability and authenticity.
Griffin as a young athlete.
You experience many disappointments, including a lawyer who mishandled your case. How did you get past that?
One by one. I can now look at it in a different way because I can actually smile at it. This lawyer represented in many ways. all the things that I didn’t like about the culture that I grew up in. He, in many ways, felt he had the decision making the power over me. So it felt very close to what I’d been through. He said to me, “You need to slow down.” I know what it’s like there. I love my community. I grew up there.
What’s interesting looking back at it now is that he was saying, “You need to slow down and deal with this.” He was right. I’ve looked at that a little bit as a gift, and as it comes full circle, I thought, “You know what? I did slow down. I did slow down enough for me.” But let me tell you, I was fuming when I was writing about him not giving back my check.
In the book I saw how so many people stepped up for you in the right way. Your husband was so supportive, you had friends, and it wasn’t everyone, but you had a lot of people that did the right thing to help you.
Everyone has things going on in their life. The universal nature of the story is that we all have broken parts of us. I’ve learned how to have a real conversation with someone. You can’t just go and tell your story to everyone because you don’t know how it’s going to affect them or what’s going on in their lives. There were differences between the way people responded.
When I told my daughters, which I thought would be the most difficult conversations of my life, they were saying to me, “Oh, we understand who you are now. Thank you for letting us into your life. Perfect love is this connection that we have together. Perfect love is not that everything looks perfect all the time.”
Do you just think that this desire or pressure a lot of women have—to be a good girl, seek approval, and not cause issues—can have potentially dangerous or unfortunate implications?
I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, and I have nothing prescriptive to offer anyone to teach you how to go live your life, other than to say that I realized through all of this for me and one person’s story that I have, again, we all have broken parts, and we think that we hide them so that people think of us as the perfect mother, perfect athlete, perfect friend. But when we do that, we lose out on the honest connections by not sharing all parts of us.
Nothing feels scary to me anymore, once you’re honest. I remember this being on the high dive when I was a child, and I tried to go to the side thinking, “Well, if you go to the side, you’re a little bit closer to the side of the pool, and that will make it easier.” Then I went to the other side of the diving board, and I remember my feet being really little then thinking, “Oh, you know what? You just have to go face forward because otherwise you might land on the concrete, and you just got to go to the end and jump.” Once you jump, it’s not that scary.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.