Several years ago, the superstar literary agent Cait Hoyt asked to be introduced to Amy Griffin via a mutual friend. Hoyt represents the likes of Kerry Washington, Hoda Kotb, and Britney Spears, and she wanted to work with Griffin too, sensing that the powerhouse investor had a story to tell. The two met over Zoom, and Hoyt made her pitch: Griffin’s G9 Ventures has backed such beloved consumer products as Bobbie baby formula, Starface zit stickers, On running shoes, and several shelves worth of SKUs at Sephora, from brands like Kosas, Saie, and Westman Atelier. Each summer, Griffin hosts a summit for founders at her Hamptons home that’s so starry, the Daily Mailhas been known to cover it. Hoyt wondered whether Griffin was interested in writing a book about women in business. Surely she had the requisite material.
“I looked at her and said, ‘I think there are a lot more qualified people to write a book about women in business. What I have to write about is more important than any other story I could tell, and I’ve already written it,’ ” Griffin remembers now. “She was like, ‘What?’ ”
Griffin went on to explain that she had pages upon pages sitting on an old laptop. It was drawn from journals she had kept during a recent period of harrowing personal revelation, and no one else had ever read them.
Griffin later told her husband, the hedge-fund founder John Griffin, that she had sent it. All of it. No redactions, no edits. “He goes, ‘What did you do?’ ” Griffin recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m just trusting the universe.’ I remember feeling like my life was going to change.”
Hoyt devoured the pages, and then she came back to Griffin: “She said, ‘I think this could help a lot of people.’ ”
Griffin is tall, slim, and blond. She is the kind of woman who, in the course of a recent weekend evening, attended a town hall, competed in a pickleball tournament, and ate Chick-fil-A at her friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. (She changed in the car.) When we meet in the lobby restaurant at the Whitby Hotel in Manhattan to discuss the book that her impulsive email turned into, she is wearing an iridescent white bouclé jacket and dark flared jeans. The most substantial of her accessories—and the lone recognizable brand—is an Oura ring. (G9 is an investor.)
Here, near her art-filled offices, with their unrestricted views of Central Park, her hint of Texas twang is barely discernible. She oozes confidence and restraint in equal measure. She is—as she writes in The Tell, out this month—far from home.
Griffin was raised in the sun-soaked Texas Panhandle, where she cruised around her neighborhood on a banana-seat bike and learned to make peace as much with the punishing heat as with the no-less-ambient expectations of womanhood in the South. Monograms abounded. Appearances were not just maintained but also obsessed over.
As a child, Griffin knows one woman who works outside the home: her own grandmother Novie, who assumed control of the business she had founded with her husband after he died. It is their chain of convenience stores that keeps her solvent with two small children. As Griffin grows up, the shops form a modest empire in West Texas, and it is obvious to her how their expansion—with Novie at the helm—sets people on edge. It defies the world order. What is a woman who is also a boss?
No one then uses the word feminist around Griffin. Sexism is rank and unsparing. She excels at school, but she runs for president of the student council with the depressing awareness that a girl will not win. She tells her friend Rachel that girls are trusted more with jobs like note-taking. And indeed Griffin is taking notes. She is observant and competitive. She aims to please. When she does lose the race to her less-qualified crush, a teacher assures her that he knows she is “the real leader of this school.”
The comment sticks with Griffin. As she recounts it in the beginning of The Tell, it sounds supportive and innocuous. It makes her glow. The teacher seems to see her as she would like to be seen. A “doer,” as one of her oldest friends, Courtney Childers, puts it to me now. Someone who “makes a million things happen.”
The Tell relays how Griffin leaves her hometown. She heads north, first to Virginia for college and then to New York. But West Texas has its teeth in her still. She blames herself for being half dressed when an intruder breaks into a house she is living in in college. She covers up on a topless beach on a vacation in Spain. Her father introduces her to the son of an acquaintance who is in Europe at the same time as she is spending a summer there. She writes of a charmed date that ends in his apartment. It’s late, and she has been drinking. She assumes he’ll behave; he knows her father! When he ignores her pleas to stop, she dissociates. “I felt nothing until he stopped moving,” she writes. Then she cries.
Just how determined is Griffin to preserve some semblance of control? She sleeps with him several times that summer. After he moves to the States and marries, Griffin continues to socialize with him and his wife, “as if nothing had ever happened between us.” She refuses to let it hurt.
Other experiences do hurt. Griffin maintains a relentless running practice and incurs a series of debilitating injuries. But she can’t seem to slow down. She meets John, and their wedding announcement is printed in The New York Times. She has four children in rapid succession. She is, in the parlance of the South, so blessed. She is also falling apart.
Griffin pushes past events that shake her. She freaks out at a dentist appointment when she’s told to sit still. She loses it when John moves to hold her hands behind her back as a joke. When her daughters tell her she doesn’t seem like a real person to them, she is bewildered and wounded.
The Tell does not make much of it, but she starts to build G9 amid this period of brittleness. She is focused on women-founded companies and realizes she has her grandmother’s knack for merchandising. She knows how to pick winners. And she is a hard worker. Griffin grimaces when she recalls how the head of the preschool her children attended hauls her in while Griffin is in the process of planning an event for toddlers: “She said, ‘Amy, I have no doubt you could run a small- to medium-sized country. You really don’t have to do this much.’ ”
At the time, Griffin is irate. “I was like, she said ‘small- to medium-sized’! Why not large? Why not a large-sized country?”
Griffin thrives at work. But she is suffering. After someone close to her tries MDMA in a therapeutic context, she decides to book a session with the facilitator. In the book, the scene that follows is taut and explosive. Decades of repression give out, and she—a woman who counts Gwyneth Paltrow as a close personal friend, who is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who posts inspirational quotes on Instagram and double-checks that the cappuccino she orders at lunch is decaffeinated—is flooded with vivid memories of childhood sexual abuse. The teacher who had singled her out for praise had singled her out for torment too. She can see his boot on her back. She can picture how he washed her mouth out with soap and tied her hands behind her back.
Less than a week after the memories reemerge, John tells Griffin to start writing. “He said, ‘Go write this down so you can make sense of it,’ ” Griffin says. “And so I did that.”
She had over 100,000 words within a few months.
Griffin didn’t set out to make all of this public. She is a “good southern girl”—polished, never late, aware of how salt and pepper shakers should move around a dinner table. G9 was humming. Meghan Markle would soon be posing for photos at one of her summer summits. She waited to tell her parents and friends, whom she knew would be devastated. Childers in particular was dumbfounded. “I just felt so awful,” she remembers. “Because we were together all the time. I just hate that I was there, but not there for these things that were so traumatic.”
Scores of survivors of sexual abuse are not believed, but Griffin has not had that problem. Her husband, her parents, her children, her sister—no one has ever doubted her. It was Griffin who reached out to experts at the start, desperate for someone to tell her what she wanted to hear: “There were a million times I would call a doctor and be like, ‘Come on, isn’t there an out?’ ” she says. “ ‘That this isn’t true?’ ”
How did Griffin forget? It’s a question that hangs over The Tell. Scientists explain it to her. She reads papers on repressed trauma. She still does not have a great answer. Over Thanksgiving, her mother asked her again, despairing: “Why didn’t you tell me?” Griffin isn’t sure. She knows there will be readers who wonder too. But “this book is not about believing me,” she continues. “I think, through this process, I just gave all of that up.”
There are no dates in The Tell, but Griffin explains that the pandemic was still raging when her memories returned. She is sure that the forced “slowdown” is part of what made it possible for her to face them. Her calendar was clear. She writes that her therapist introduced her to Kali, the Hindu goddess who represents both death and destruction and creation and salvation. Griffin latched on to her example, giving herself uncharacteristic permission to lash out while her new memories swirled. She is reluctant to name silver linings, but the timing was a gift: “Even people that really knew I was going through something—I wasn’t sitting around talking about Kali at banker meetings.”
Instead, she was poring over the statute of limitations in Texas, wondering if she could put her abuser in prison. She hired more than one lawyer to run background checks and look for people who could corroborate her experiences. She gave a two-hour statement to a police sergeant in her hometown who told her he believed her. She called other former teachers, hoping she’d be able to lean on their memories of her during that time. “I was like, okay, I’m going to do what I do with everything else. I’m going to control this,” Griffin says. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to do it in record time. I’m going to heal personally, and I’m going to get him!’ I remember walking into the house and being like, I’m going to be the best survivor ever!” It took months to parse the legal code. It turned out her teacher could not and cannot be held liable. The window for pressing charges had shut.
Griffin insists she did not write a book about trauma. She wrote one about “going through something” hard—how she coped, how she let go of her need for control, how she came to terms with not just what happened to her but also the fact that she will never get total resolution. For months, Griffin searched for other victims. None turned up. In The Tell, she tracks down a fellow student from her school who she thinks might also have been a target. The woman stonewalls her. Readers will perhaps crave a neater ending than Griffin can provide. She has friends who have written prescriptive books brimming with counsel. The Tell offers no protocol. “I don’t have any advice to give,” she says, “other than, ‘I’m telling you how I trusted myself.’ ”
In the absence of straightforward closure, she has devised her own strategy for moving forward. Sharing this is part of it. “I’m living an even more incredible life,” she says. “The freedom I have felt since telling it—it used to be that if I told someone, I couldn’t function for three days.” Now she finds herself talking about it with teachers at her children’s schools, with the husband of a friend, with founders.
Laura Modi, the CEO of the formula startup Bobbie (Griffin chased her down at a conference when she wanted to invest), recalls Griffin volunteering her story on the sidelines of an event. “She gave me the full history of how it happened, her bottling it up for many years, her opening up to her own family,” Modi says. Griffin explained that she had been thinking about writing a book. “And when I heard that from Amy, it felt so obvious,” Modi continues. “Because Amy’s reputation is not one of being a cutthroat investor. Amy’s reputation is one of honesty, integrity, transparency. For her to tell me this story, it was like, yes, this makes a lot of sense.”
Amy Sherald, the artist known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, was not surprised to learn that this was the book Griffin had written either, but she was impressed. Last year, she asked Griffin to meet, hoping to discuss investing opportunities. “We were chatting, and she told me about it,” Sherald says. “I’m also a southern girl, and we were both raised similarly. The way she was able to process it—it gives people like us permission to get down to the bottom of the emotional traumas we have in a way that might not be traditional but is still very effective.”
Not everyone has been so understanding. “There were so many times people would say, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Amy, you have such a perfect life!’ ” Griffin says. “And it’s like, no. It would be inauthentic if I didn’t tell this story. I have to lean into my truth and not worry about trying to prove anything to anybody.”
After Griffin decided to write The Tell, she went on a walk with the actress Mariska Hargitay, whose Joyful Heart Foundation supports survivors of sexual violence. The women have been friends for years, and Griffin expressed her hope that she would be able to draw attention to the work that Joyful Heart does as she promoted her own book. “I said, ‘I have to go do this and this. I want to help these organizations,’ ” Griffin recalls.
But Hargitay gently cut her off. “I said to Amy that her first responsibility was to herself,” Hargitay explains. “The first step is engagement with ourselves. Sometimes it can even feel easier to help others heal, to turn outward rather than inward. I told Amy that the biggest gift that she can give herself—which may then ultimately also have the power to help others—is to tell her story.”
Griffin did three sessions with the woman who administered her doses of MDMA. She had not so much as smoked a joint before. She has not used it since. “I got what I needed,” Griffin says. “But it’s not a miracle. It gives you the tools to face your life. And so you just have to be really ready to do the real work that starts after you go through the process, because there is no magic pill.”
The Tell seems destined for airport bookstores, for street-facing windows, for morning television. It’s not hard to see how the book could reach the men who assaulted her all those decades ago. Griffin swears she has let go of revenge fantasies. She doesn’t need them: “The focus is on me, not them. I think I realized that in writing. It was never about them. I’ve won.”