by Christie Tate ★★★★★
Who is Christie Tate? That was the question I was asking myself back in 2020 when her memoir Group started popping up on a number of "best of" lists. As I wrote at the time, Christie Tate is not someone anyone had heard of -- why should we want to read about her life? Upon finishing Group, it was obvious why it was published: it’s a tremendous memoir.
So how does someone who went from obscurity to bestselling author of a memoir follow that up? She can't go back and relive things she already covered...or can she? Where Group dealt primarily with Tate's struggles with romantic relationships (and eating, and a half dozen other disorders), B.F.F. focuses on Christie's friendships, specifically her friendships with women, and all of the ways that her struggles impacted and sabotaged those over the course of her life. The titular B.F.F. is a woman named Meredith, who we learn in the opening lines of the book has passed away. And while the growth and evolution of Christie's friendship with Meredith is the constant thread to which we return in the book, this is another in-depth and candid account of Christie's struggles.
Part of what made Group so captivating for me was the novelty of the pure and unbridled honesty of the writing. As I said at the time, "it’s one that probably wouldn’t work as fiction because enough of the things that happen are too absurd to believe." Tate is fearless when it comes to chronicling events, particularly those where she is cast in an unflattering light. There are plenty in B.F.F., whether it's her grade school obsession with being best friends with the most popular girl, her high school obsession with a boyfriend, or her jealousy of other women in adulthood. While B.F.F. lacks the novelty of Group, the things that made Group such a memorable and enjoyable memoir for me also play out here.
One interesting evolution from Group is that I think that B.F.F. contains a good amount of useful self-help information, whereas Group was more simply a chronicle of Christie's journey to a stable life via an unconventional form of therapy. Female friendship and male friendship is distinctly different, and as a man it was kind of intriguing to peek behind the curtain of how women interact with each other and develop their friendships. It made it a little harder for me to relate, but there are valuable nuggets for any reader, and I suspect most women have shared several similar experiences to those Tate describes. There's an underlying layer of subtle advice to this book that I think will ring true with many female readers.
While reading Group was like watching a trainwreck, there is a greater level of relatability in B.F.F. I didn't enjoy it on quite the same level, but it's close. In the acknowledgements Tate says "Thank you to my parents for calmly accepting my memoir career -- I promise I'll give fiction a go next." I do think yet another memoir would be going to the well once too often, because there are small portions of this that feel like a retread of what worked previously, but I'm a big fan of how Tate writes and I'll be just as interested to read her fiction if she does in fact go in that direction.
If you haven't read Group, read that one first, but then make space for this on your shelf.