The Tell

When Linda I. Meyers was a little girl in the 1940s, she had a recurring dream: she was an astronaut, accidentally separated from the mothership, and doomed to float alone in the darkness of space until she died. Years later, when she became a psychologist, she realized that the dream harbored both the wish to detach from her mother and the fear that such a separation would mean death—a fear that was worsened by her mother’s constant threats that Linda and her father would be “the death of her,” and accusations that they “wouldn’t be happy until she was six feet under.”
On December 17, 1970, Linda’s mother, for the fifth time that day, called her. Now twenty-eight and busy raising three little boys of her own, Linda began to feel like she was being dragged once again into the undertow of her mother’s depression, she did something she had never done before: she begged her to please let her go. The next day, her mother killed herself.
Severed from the mothership, staggered by conflicting feelings of relief and remorse, and determined to give meaning to her mother’s death, Linda realized it was time to change her life—and she set out to do just that.
Written with irony and humor as a series of stand-alone essays that build upon one another, The Tell is one woman’s touching, inspirational, and often funny story of Before and After—and, ultimately, of emancipation and purpose.