Christie Tate Books in Order

Christie Tate grew up in Dallas, Texas, and a lot of her work still carries that background with it, family expectations, church, school, sharp humor, and the feeling of being both loved and a little out of step. She now lives in Chicago with her family and writes memoir and essays that stay close to the body and the mess of ordinary life.

She writes about the things people usually hide.

After college, Tate moved to Chicago for graduate school and later law school. She was the kind of person who knew how to achieve, study harder, collect praise, and keep going. In her own telling, that skill set could take her a long way academically and professionally, but it could not teach her how to ask for help.

That split, between outward success and inner panic, became the engine of her writing. When she first sat down to tell the story that became Group, she tried fiction. It didn't work. She began the book in 2015 after a messy novel draft, and the truth kept pushing through, so she turned to memoir and wrote more directly about therapy, shame, desire, and the long process of learning how to be known.

She has said that a writing workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch helped her dig deeper and stop skimming past the hardest scenes.

Group became her breakout book. In it, Tate writes about the years when she entered group therapy in Chicago, convinced she was too damaged for real connection and too high-functioning to fall apart in public. Readers found a lot to hold on to there: the dark humor, the brutal honesty, the awkwardness of group dynamics, and the relief of watching someone slowly build a life with more truth in it. The memoir became a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club selection. It also gave a lot of readers their first vivid picture of what group therapy actually feels like, not as a neat breakthrough machine, but as a room full of friction, care, repetition, and hard-won trust.

Her second memoir, B.F.F., shifts the focus from therapy and romantic chaos to female friendship. Tate looks back at the friendships she mishandled, abandoned, or misunderstood, then centers the book on Meredith, a friend she met in recovery who helped change her idea of what loyalty and care can look like. The book is about closeness, but also about jealousy, shame, grief, and how hard it can be to stay present with another person when old defenses kick in.

Across both books, the same questions keep surfacing. How do people learn to trust? What happens when achievement becomes a shield? How do you make room for love, friendship, and recovery when you've spent years trying to control everything? Tate's work returns again and again to eating disorders, addiction, family patterns, and the ache of feeling separate from other people.

Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and McSweeney's, among other places. Her essays have also been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and one of them won a nonfiction contest judged by Kiese Laymon in 2019. She also writes about Texas, including her grandmother's farm in Forreston, which gives her work a strong sense of place even when the emotional terrain is the main story.

These days, Tate still lives in Chicago with her family. What makes her books stick is not tidy redemption. It's the sense that connection is a practice, and that telling the truth, even clumsily at first, can be one way back to other people.