Silos, Secrets, and Silence
Mary Anne Totten
Comments
Sharing Her Story To help Us With Reconciliation
11/2/2025
Thanks to the author for sharing her life experiences with us readers. She is courageous and strong to help others with her story. Her story brings sadness to my heart for the hard relationship with her mother and father. But with her persistent determination to confront her parents, she attained some reconciliation, and she has become a spiritually mature woman.
--Janice Brown
Asheville, NC
The Necessity for Communication
11/20/2025
Mary Anne’s Silos, Secrets and Silence is a brave and honest description/confession of a child, then an adult, struggling to make sense of our adult world. Even well-intentioned families miss an obvious need and assume others should.…just understand. Coping with family alcoholism only conflates all issues. In an effort to examine our own family dynamics, we need to realize how simple (and necessary) it can be to ease the way for the next generation we love. A good read!
--Beverly McGuire
Concord, NH
Family/Emotional
11/21/2025
This is an amazing honest book about abandonment, what life throws at you, identity, and seeking forgiveness. I love books that are raw and real such as this. If I had any critique, I did not always love the timeline of things as she jumps from things that happened in her childhood to middle aged to older and sometimes I didn't understand that flow. But this book still made me cry and think on my own family and our issues and my own insecurities, secrets, silos, and forgiveness track. Thank you for telling us your story!
--Kyrie Lynch
Forgiveness is a Process
12/27/2025
Alcoholism is just one topic covered in a very personal, sometimes painful book by Dr. Mary Anne Totten. She delves into a myriad of issues from family dysfunction to sexual orientation to sexism in the workplace to spirituality, all within the context of her amazing life. Dr. Totten has much to forgive but forgive she does. The author describes forgiveness not as one moment in time but as a process. I find it interesting that the author does not organize her book by a timeline but rather through different aspects of her life. She tells honest stories to reflect a lifetime of mysteries, struggles, wins and losses. The author challenges us to engage in forgiveness for our sanity and for the hope of reconciliation. As a pastor, I highly recommend this book for an honest lesson on the struggles and benefits of forgiveness.
--Rev. Peggy Petrich
Morgantown, WV
Gibson's Book Store
March 5, 2026
"I very much enjoyed and appreciated your book review and discussion last night at Gibson's. I do find that it is taking a lifetime to become authentic, to know and acknowledge the "truth". The title of your book strikes a chord with my life story. Thank you for sharing and allowing your vulnerability to flow into the pages of your memoir, your story is indeed helpful to me."
--Mary Lou
Concord, NH
Breaking Through Silence
March 15, 2026
Silos, Secrets, and Silence: Forgiving My Family's Alcoholism, by Mary Anne Totten is about forgiveness. This book tells of the difficult growing up, primarily related to alcoholism. This well-written book paints pictures of times when lack of support for her as a child makes it hard for Mary Anne to develop self-confidence, despite her achievements. Secrets and lack of communication with her and among her parents sometime put her in difficult situations. Her determination since age four to become a physician led to her success. Understandings later in her life allowed her to come to forgiveness of her dysfunctional family.
--Betty Lane
Dover, NH
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