Group

At some point while I was reading Group, I said to my wife, “I’m not really sure how this book got greenlit -- the author is no one you’ve ever heard of, she hasn’t accomplished anything you’d be aware of...I don’t get it.” Having finished the book, I know the answer: it’s a tremendous memoir.

Life is hard for Christie Tate, and while on the surface things probably seem fine, she has issues with eating, issues with relationships, and issues with self-confidence. While she’s not overtly suicidal, she does take unnecessary tours around Chicago's Cabrini Green in the hopes that someone might just shoot her and end it all. It’s at this point where a co-worker tells her about a therapist she’s been seeing whose philosophy is “unconfidential group therapy”. The therapist insists on total honesty about everything and also encourages members of the group to discuss other patients with their spouses, friends, co-workers, anyone. It’s unconventional, but Tate has tried all of the conventional approaches up to this point.

What follows is Tate’s journey and all of the unflattering details that go with it. It also felt wholly authentic -- no one would make up stuff to make themselves look as bad as Tate makes herself appear! It’s amazing and brave that she would expose the most intimate details of her life, and perhaps the greatest success story of her therapy is the book itself -- if her group are sharing all of her details with their friends and family, she may as well just share them with the world! It’s brutally honest, uncomfortably so, but also blends in humor and clear self-awareness.

I read this immediately after A Knock At Midnight, and it’s so much better. It made me realize even more acutely the flaws in Amazon’s #1 BotY. There’s a throughline and character arc, and it’s one that probably wouldn’t work as fiction because enough of the things that happen are too absurd to believe. While Tate is protagonist AND antagonist (will she sabotage things again?), it works, and her honesty makes you root for her success.