GROUP

GROUP is the debut memoir of a guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers - her psychotherapy group - and in turn finds human connection, and herself.

Christie Tate had just been named the #1 student in her law school class and had her eating disorder under control at long last. Why then was she driving through Chicago hoping someone would shoot her in the head? Why was she fantasizing about putting an end to the isolation and sadness that continued to plague her in spite of all of her achievements?

Enter Dr. Rosen, a therapist who calmly assures her that he can transform her life if she joins one of his psychotherapy groups. Her part of the deal? Show up and be honest about everything - her sexual history, her eating habits, her childhood. Christie is skeptical, and insists that inviting six complete strangers into the darkest corners of her shame would be unlikely to help. She is defective, the doomed possessor of a heart so slick and unscored nothing can attach to it; she is beyond cure. Dr. Rosen issues a nine-word prescription that will change everything: "You don't need a cure, you need a witness."

So begins her entry into the strange, terrifying, and ultimately life-changing world of group therapy. Christie resists and mocks the ways of the group at first, and is initially put off by Dr. Rosen's outlandish directives ("Bingeing on apples every night before bed? From now on call fellow group member Rory every night before you go to sleep and report how many apples you ate. Just the number, and then hang up." "Flirting with a classmate who has a girlfriend? Next time you see him in the library, inform him matter-of-factly that you're a cock-tease.") But as her defenses break down and she comes to trust Dr. Rosen and to depend on the sessions, the prescribed nightly phone calls, she begins to understand what it means to connect. She starts to wonder if maybe her slick, unscored heart isn't beyond attaching after all.

Group is a deliciously addictive read, and with Christie as guide - skeptical of her own capacity for connection and intimacy, but hopeful in spite of herself - we are given a front row seat to the daring, exhilarating, painful, and hilarious journey that is group therapy, an under-explored process that breaks you down, and then reassembles you so that all the pieces finally fit.

Christie Tate is a Chicago-based writer and essayist. She has been published in The New York Times (Modern Love), The Rumpus, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Eastern Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Kiese Laymon selected her essay, Promised Lands, as the winner of the New Ohio Review's nonfiction contest, which was published this fall.