In 1973, Jennifer Fox wrote a story for her 8th grade English class called ‘The Tale,’ which alluded to an intimate relationship between a 13-year-old girl and her running and riding coaches. Her teacher thought it was fiction. It wasn’t. “I wrote at 13 with no concept of abuse at all,” she says. “It was a love story.” Decades later, Fox’s mother found the story, forcing her to confront her past trauma and see it with new eyes. Fox wrote and directed the new HBO film ‘The Tale,’ starring Laura Dern, about her reckoning with the abuse. “The film is about the stories we tell ourselves to survive,” she says.