S. F. Prescott

Terrifying and utterly heartbreaking!

Amy Griffin lives in New York City with her husband, John, and their four children. She is the founder of the investment firm G9 Ventures.

Published March 11th, 2025.

This memoir had me by the throat. The premise alone triggered a deep rooted fear that my brain might be hiding something from my past as an act of ‘protection.’

I couldn’t put this book down. Amy Griffin’s voice led me through her powerful story of adolescence, family, friendship, heartbreak, perseverance, and healing. So many elements of her experiences resonated with me as a woman, and I found myself emotional at the author’s vulnerability when recalling certain traumas from her past. So many of her memories have stuck with me, and I have saved a multitude of quotable lines on my kindle. (More than any other book.) Since 2017, I have read a number of deeply personal stories by women, but rarely have I found one that looks past the trauma and illustrates what real healing looks like. Griffin’s memoir does just that. In life we so rarely get the opportunity to look our demons in the eye, and her story is no different. But even though the ending of this true story wasn’t the brutal and bloody aftermath I often long for (in fiction), its conclusion still left me feeling satisfied and hopeful about what a post #MeToo future can look like on a personal level.

For readers who enjoy true stories of courage and endurance.

Synopsis:

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?” So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.