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 track coach. 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.

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.