The novel I"m Telling, written by the author Karen E. Quinones Miller, offers a fascinating look into the life of a family in the process of being torn apart by a deplorable secret which goes overlooked throughout the novel. Faith and Hope are twin sisters who lead very different lives due to a secret which Faith tries to bring out into the open in order to deal with and overcome it. When the twins were eleven years old, Faith caught her stepfather, Alfred, whom they refer to as Papa, molesting Hope. Their mother, Miss Irene, who has pretty much given up on herself as she struggles to keep relationships with men who give her no respect, along with Hope, have been in denial about the secret and who was to blame for the occurrence. At this point in their lives, Faith is a successful literary agent while her sister, Hope, is a prostitute with a drug addiction. Fundamentally, Faith, Hope, and Miss Irene undergo much pain and heartache in their own ways due to the denial which eventually leads to the truth of the dreadful secret that they have been suppressing for so long.
Faith is a very successful woman. Not only that, but she is the one who best deals with their family secret. When she caught Papa molesting Hope, she was the one to tell Miss Irene. Unfortunately the truth never came out and instead Miss Irene blamed Hope. Faith, oddly enough, regretted telling Miss Irene what she saw because it seemed to have gotten them nowhere and she also, at first, thought that it hadn't bothered Hope. The next day, after the episode between Papa and Miss Irene was when Faith noticed that the Barbie dolls that Hope was calmly playing with the day before were headless, naked, covered in blue ink on their stomachs, and the pelvic area on each had been viciously mutilated (46). I think that at that point Faith knew that Hope would never be the same and she hated Papa for that. Faith's way of dealing with the situation is to try to suppress it just like her mother and sister do, but every now and then, she feels like it needs to be dealt with once and for all.
