What if something terrible happened to you, and you weren’t able to remember it? That’s one of the questions at the center of Amy Griffin’s memoir, The Tell, which is quickly becoming one of the year’s most talked-about books.

Griffin’s buzzy bestseller doesn’t offer easy answers or tidy conclusions about its dark subject matter — its author’s sexual assault by a trusted teacher as a preteen — which only seems to make her story about recovering harrowing memories of the abuse after trying psychedelic therapy all the more powerful for readers.

Griffin’s status as a high-powered investor and Silicon Valley “girlboss” working with companies like Goop and Bumble gave her attention in high places. She has the support of book club titans like Oprah Winfrey, Jenna Bush Hager, and Reese Witherspoon. Elle praised the memoir as “a new kind of story about abuse.” According to Elle, it “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.” Kirkus Reviews summarized the book as “an important, wholly believable account of how long-buried but profoundly formative experiences finally emerge.”

Yet at the book’s center is a particularly thorny issue: that of repressed memories, which are considered an impossibility by most research psychologists and neuroscientists but touted by many therapists who work directly with patients. A repressed memory is one in which, allegedly, a memory that previously didn’t exist of a previously unknown experience suddenly appears. Such memories are routinely depicted as real throughout pop culture, and while The Tell confronts the possibility that they may be false, Griffin herself quickly loses all doubt.

Add in the potentially dicey treatment that Griffin underwent: psychedelic MDMA therapy. Despite reportedly helping patients with trauma and PTSD, it has yet to win federal approval in the US. Technically, it’s illegal.

As The Tell continues to dominate the New York Times bestseller list, how should we think about the less-than-legal therapy that inspired it and the splashy, concerning revelations that came next?

The complicated therapy at The Tell’s core

A lifelong runner, Griffin uses her hobby as a metaphor for the pressure she places on herself, not only to succeed but to avoid confronting her own trauma. This is how she pushes through her overachieving childhood; through a horrifying date rape in college; through a busy life juggling work, home, and family.

But all this running isn’t just toward the next achievement — it’s away from something deeper she just can’t name. At one point, her then 10-year-old daughter tells Griffin that she and her sister don’t feel connected to her. “We don’t feel like we know who you are,” Griffin recounts her saying. “You’re nice, but you’re not real.”

This rejection inspires her to look deeper within, and her husband John introduces her to the therapist whose MDMA sessions he’s benefited from.

Over the last decade, alternative drug therapies like MDMA, ayahuasca, and

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