Truths I Never Told You

Starred review from January 13, 2020
Postpartum depression impacts two generations of women in Rimmer’s illuminating tale of a family’s unspoken troubles (after The Things We Cannot Say). After taking fertility drugs for six years during the 1990s, child psychologist Beth Walsh feels that having Noah, now five months old, was a mistake, and fears she might purposefully harm him, thoughts she keeps to herself and finds especially disturbing. Beth welcomes the distraction of helping her three older siblings clean out the family home in Seattle as their father, Patrick, enters hospice care with dementia. In the attic, she finds journal entries from her late mother, Grace. Written in the 1950s, they leave an unsettling image of the seemingly perfect Patrick, describing his unhappiness and heavy drinking. As the siblings pick up on Beth’s depression and rally to get her help, their support contrasts with Patrick’s dismissive response to Grace’s “baby blues,” as evidenced in the journal entries. In Patrick’s dementia, he mistakes Beth for Maryanne, Grace’s sister, and tries to apologize for past wrongs, leading Beth to clues about her parents’ gloom. With a mix of engrossing mystery and deep feeling, Rimmer offers a harrowing account of a doomed mother’s experience in the ’50s and a family grappling with the truth. Rimmer’s suspenseful narrative will enthrall and move readers.

April 1, 2020

Plagued with insomnia and feelings of inadequacy and unable to stand the cries of her newborn son, Beth cannot understand how the years of trying to get pregnant have gone so wrong. She and her brothers and sister grew up in a house full of love and support; Beth was always amazed at how her widowed father was able to raise four young children and run his own construction business. Now, she can't even look at her baby's face. When heart failure and dementia send her elderly father into hospice care, Beth throws herself into packing up the family home. Behind a locked attic door, she discovers a new set of her father's paintings and her mother's journal, with notes that indicate darker secrets in their family's history. Did their mother really die in an auto accident? Beth and her siblings endeavor to reveal the truth of their early childhood. VERDICT Best-selling author Rimmer (The Things We Cannot Say) expertly illustrates a heartbreaking portrayal of postpartum depression through multiple perspectives in dual time lines. For fans who appreciate emotionally wrenching reads such as those by Sarah Jio or Kristin Hannah.--Joy Gunn, Paseo Verde Lib., Henderson, NV

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