Venus Morris Griffin is the author of the new memoir The Other Side of Perfect: A True Story of Love, Lies, and Learning to Forgive.
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?
A: Honestly, I didn’t want to. Staying quiet felt safer for a long time. But keeping quiet never protected me or my kids. It only protected him.
When their dad went to prison, I had six children, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and no idea what I was going to do. I remember praying that if God got us through it, I would spend the rest of my life helping other women get through their own hard things. This book is me keeping that promise.
Then Humans of New York shared my story, and women wrote to me from all over the world. Some told me they had been ready to give up. That’s when it stopped being my story and became a story about all of us.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Most people thought my life was perfect. They saw a husband everyone loved, a beautiful family, a house full of kids, and later, the career I built. What they didn’t see was what was happening behind closed doors, or what it cost me to hold that picture up.
Keeping up perfect was a 20-year sentence for me, and I served every day of it.
That’s really what The Other Side of Perfect means. Every person has a story people can’t see. I hope this book reminds readers not to be too quick to judge someone else’s life, because we rarely know what they’re carrying.
And I can tell you there is far more happiness on this side of it. An honest life is lighter than a perfect one.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between you and your then-husband, Tripp?
A: That’s probably the hardest question to answer because there wasn’t just one Tripp. There was the man everyone loved. He was funny, generous, charismatic, and had a way of making people feel seen. I loved that man deeply, and so did almost everyone who knew him.
But there was another side that very few people ever saw. As the years went on, our marriage became filled with lies, manipulation, emotional abuse, and eventually things I never imagined I’d face.
Looking back, I spent years trying to make sense of two very different versions of the same person. I kept hoping the man I loved was the real one and that the other side would eventually disappear. It never did.
I also have to be honest that there were moments my gut told me something was wrong and I talked myself out of it, because leaving felt like failing and staying felt like faith. That’s one of the biggest lessons in my memoir. Love should never require you to ignore the truth.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope people take away from it?
A: It was harder than I expected. I had spent years not thinking about certain things on purpose, and writing meant going back and sitting in them until I could get them down on paper.
There were nights I quit. There were parts I did not want in there at all, and I put them in anyway, because leaving them out would have made it a different book.
What surprised me was how much lighter I felt afterward. I had kept quiet for a long time, partly to protect my children and partly because I didn’t want anyone to know. There was shame in it. I never believed his shame was mine to carry, but living inside it still made me want to hide.
As for what I hope people take from it, I want them to read it and think, if she got out of that, I can get out of mine.
That is the entire reason it exists.
Nothing in the book is dressed up. It is what happened, and then what I did next. And the second part is the part I really want people to see. I hope this book serves as a roadmap for somebody in the darkest moment of their life, so they know the way out exists even when they cannot see it yet.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, the book. Getting it out into the world and into the hands of the people who might need it is my biggest focus.
I’m also still selling real estate, which is the career I built from nothing when I was trying to put my life back together. I still love it, and I’m proud of what that career allowed me to build for my family.
And then there’s the VMG Foundation. We give $10,000 college scholarships to children who have a parent who is currently incarcerated. Those kids are so often the forgotten ones. I want them to know that what happened in their family does not define their future, and that they are seen, they are heard, and they matter.
I’m donating all of the proceeds from this book to the VMG Foundation and to other organizations that are changing people’s lives. That was the point from the very beginning. I have seven children now, and so much of what I did was about making sure they (my six children at the time) didn’t have to carry what I carried.
And I owe Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, more than he probably knows. I had been sharing my story and speaking around the country for years before I met him, but Brandon gave my story a reach I never could have imagined.
When he shared it through Humans of New York, millions of people around the world read it, and the response made me realize how many people could see pieces of their own lives in mine.
He wrote the foreword to this book, and I’ll always be grateful for the way he helped my story reach people I never could have reached on my own.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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