About the Book
With her father recently moved to a care facility, Beth Walsh volunteers to clear out the family home and is surprised to discover the door to her childhood playroom padlocked. She’s even more shocked at what’s behind it—a hoarder’s mess of her father’s paintings, mounds of discarded papers and miscellaneous junk in the otherwise fastidiously tidy house.
As she picks through the clutter, she finds a loose journal entry in what appears to be her late mother’s handwriting. Beth and her siblings grew up believing their mother died in a car accident when they were little more than toddlers, but this note suggests something much darker.
Beth soon pieces together a disturbing portrait of a woman suffering from postpartum depression and a husband who bears little resemblance to the loving father Beth and her siblings know. With a newborn of her own and struggling with motherhood, Beth finds there may be more tying her and her mother together than she ever suspected.
The Review
Truths I Never Told You is a beautifully written story. It is told from three perspectives – from Grace in the 1950s, her sister Maryanne, and Grace’s daughter Beth in the 1990s. Each woman carries a secret that could be catastrophic to their lives and those of their loved ones. It begins with packing up an old family home, the middle deals with the mystery that results from this and the end becomes a tale of redemption. What is unusual is that so many characters with good intentions need this.
The book will take you on a roller coaster of emotions. Without giving away any spoilers, it deals with what really happened to the character of Grace and if Beth is so much like her mother that it could destroy her. It is a book that starts with Grace and ends with Beth. It is solving a mystery with clues that are difficult to decipher because the one person who knows all of the answers has dementia – Grace’s father, Patrick.
You will come to understand the struggles that mothers with postpartum depression and mental illness have to live with. You can’t help but feel the trauma and sadness that Grace and Beth go through. There is also no doubt that you want to know what happened to Grace, but that is balanced with Beth’s need to know. The book will make you think about what secrets you will find as you go through your own family home.
Truths I Never Told You has been compared to books by Jodi Piccoult and Kristin Hannah. While these books share the emotional journeys of female protagonists, Rimmer’s writing is incomparable. This is a beautifully written book that shows the power of family love and redemption.
Favourite Line From the Book
“Loneliness is so much worse than sadness, because loneliness, by definition, cannot be shared.” This is true for several characters in Truths I Never Told You, but also the time that we are living in right now.
