50 pages • 1 hour read
Christie TateGroup: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Scored Heart
Tate uses the symbol of a scored heart as a controlling metaphor to mark her emotional progress throughout the memoir. Tate establishes this metaphor by relating an experience she had in a high school pottery class, where clay handles had to be scored, or cut into at the attachment site, if they were to stick to mugs fired in a kiln. In this class, Christie fails to score her handles, and they fall right off during the firing process. She then relates this experience to the state of her heart and the importance and difficulties of forming connections. She says, “That was how I'd always imagined the surface of my heart—smooth, slick, unattached. Nothing to grab onto” (6). This establishes her goals for therapy. She's looking for experiences that will open her heart and help her to attach.
Toward the end of the memoir, Tate writes, “My heart, a messy, pulpy thing, was scored from each attempt, each near miss, each lunge towards other people, those who loved me back and those who didn't” (248). There is a marked difference between the character who can embrace her mistakes in dating and her flaws of anger and self-harm and the character who was too afraid to form connections in Chapter 1. With an engagement ring on her finger, she can make connections and let go of people who do not wish to connect with her. Furthermore, she now has the tools to deepen her connections through the continued scoring of her heart.
Death
The motif of death represents Tate’s mental-health challenges and her opportunities for healing. The memoir’s subtitle, How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, Tate signals that she uses therapy to confront death. As Christie undergoes the therapeutic process, there are moments when she commits acts of violence against herself. Ultimately, though, Christie never attempts suicide, and her violent acts eventually stop, demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment she's receiving.
The main imagery of death as a source of trauma and fear is Tate’s experience of watching her friend’s father, David, drown while on vacation in Hawaii. This runs parallel to other group member’s experiences with death, especially Marty’s. He is a doctor who keeps the urn of a child he couldn’t save upon the subsequent death of the child’s father. Christie and Marty are processing these deaths at the same time, both having come to group seeking help with suicidal ideation. Christie thinks that sharing her experience in group will be enough to heal her; however, when Dr. Rosen prepares to go on a beach vacation the next week, Christie is forced to confront her trauma. The trauma associated with this death is still rooted so deeply that Christie is forced to express it as an involuntary scream.
Because Dr. Rosen gives Christie the opportunity to confront her trauma, she is able to embrace it. She finally admits that she will always carry it and recognizes that she can’t let that prevent her from forming connections. Similarly, Marty is able to move forward by giving Christie the child’s urn (at Dr. Rosen’s invitation) and proposing to his girlfriend.
Food
Although Christie’s bulimia is not the primary focus of this memoir, her relationship with food is a motif that represents her ability to be vulnerable. One of the earliest ways Dr. Rosen pushes Christie is by asking her to share her eating habits with the group. Christie feels shame about sharing the secrets of her eating, which is designed to prevent bingeing, not to be enjoyable: “My law school friend saw my odd lunch every day because I couldn't hide it: a can of tuna in spring water over a bed of cabbage doused with French's Classic Yellow Mustard. They justifiably made fun of me for how disgusting and unimaginative it was” (37). This, along with other cabbage-heavy meals and a shocking number of apples, is the unappetizing starting place of this motif. However, as the text continues, Christie is confronted with, and even consumes, increasingly appetizing food.
Her first date with Alex reveals her progress in letting go of the silence and secret-keeping that has led to shame and self-loathing. Before they confide in each other, they split a shepherd’s pie for dinner. Christie’s hesitation with the unknown, greasy, carb-filled food triggers her fear of bingeing, but she is able to dive in and consume something that would have led to dangerously unhealthy behavior at another point in her life.
Finally, when Dr. Rosen’s wife makes a gorgeous meal of Christie’s favorite foods for Christie and her fiancé, she is able to appreciate it: “Dr. Rosen's wife served a brilliant-orange carrot soup with a dollop of melting cream in the center. I swirled my spoon around, and the cream dissolved. It tasted rich and earthy” (263). Here there is no hesitation about experiencing and enjoying this beautiful soup that was prepared specifically for Christie. She isn’t disgusted by it or ashamed of it, and there is no fear of relapsing. On the ride home, Christie cries because “the night was so lovely, the food so delicious, the occasion so improbable” (264). The impact of enjoying delicious food with people she cares about without any shame or secret-keeping demonstrates how far she’s come on her journey of healing.
