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Mary Anne Totten presents her powerful memoir, Silos, Secrets, and Silence: Forgiving My Family's Alcoholism. https://gibsonsbookstore.com/event/silos-secrets-silence
This book relates events and experiences of growing up in a family plagued by the demons of alcoholism and the effects of emotional distance and abandonment on one's self-esteem.
Totten chronicles her journey through a childhood shaped by alcoholism, family dysfunction, and emotional isolation, exploring the winding road of forgiveness she finds herself on as an older adult. The narrative spans decades, tackling her struggles with parental abandonment, her mother’s alcoholism, and the silos of silence that defined her family’s communication. Totten’s path to becoming a physician, her relationships, and her quest for self-acceptance and reconciliation form the backbone of this deeply personal story, as, through moments of trauma, resilience, and eventual healing, she reflects on the complexities of family dynamics and the lifelong impact of unresolved pain.
Totten’s writing is raw and introspective, offering readers an unfiltered look into her emotional landscape. She openly discusses her confusion and heartbreak in relationships—including her first sexual encounter and later discovery of a boyfriend's infidelity—in detailed storytelling that weaves vivid memories with reflections on trauma and self-discovery. One of the memoir’s most powerful moments occurs when Totten describes being called to testify during her parents’ contentious divorce, thrust into an impossible position while questioned about her mother’s alcohol use. She candidly explores the sense of manipulation she experienced, as she later realizes that her testimony significantly influenced the case’s resolution. “I still harbor anger toward my father but have awakened to the fact that he was narcissistic and manipulative,” she writes.
Themes of alcoholism, generational silence, and the search for identity resonate deeply, making the memoir relatable and poignant. Totten’s ability to confront painful truths while seeking understanding and closure is inspiring, and her emotional honesty reverberates throughout. From a young age, she acknowledges that her “need for acceptance overrode everything else”—an admission that echoes both a loss of innocence and an important step in her healing journey. This testament to resilience is ideal for readers interested in family dynamics, addiction recovery, and personal growth.
Mary Anne Totten, MD, is a retired physician who practiced primary care, endocrinology, and geriatrics in Boston, Massachusetts; Parkersburg, West Virginia; and Manchester, New Hampshire.
She is a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine. After she retired from the practice of medicine in 2015, she was ordained as an interfaith spiritual minister by the Chaplaincy
Institute of Maine (ChIME). She currently volunteers in the Spiritual Care Department in her retirement community in Concord, New Hampshire. She has traveled around the world twice, has
lived in eight different states, and visited forty-six of the fifty US states. She and a colleague edited Case Studies in Primary Care for Nurses and Nurse Practitioners (Kowalski and Totten, 1990).
Future writing will include blogs related to spirituality of elders. Mary Anne had to break through the wall of non-communication and the demons of alcoholism to write her memoir, Silos, Secrets, and Silence. This is a story of growing up in a family plagued by alcoholism and walking the road to forgiveness.
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