Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The refreshingly original and "startlingly hopeful" (Lisa Taddeo) debut memoir of an over-achieving young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to group therapy and gets psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers--and finds human connection, and herself.Christie Tate had just been named the top student in her law school class and finally had her eating disorder under control. Why then was she driving through Chicago fantasizing about her own death? Why was she envisioning putting an end to the isolation and sadness that still plagued her despite her achievements? Enter Dr. Rosen, a therapist who calmly assures her that if she joins one of his psychotherapy groups, he can transform her life. All she has to do is show up and be honest. About everything--her eating habits, childhood, sexual history, etc. Christie is skeptical, insisting that that she is defective, beyond cure. But 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 is initially put off by Dr. Rosen's outlandish directives, but as her defenses break down and she comes to trust Dr. Rosen and to depend on the sessions and the prescribed nightly phone calls with various group members, she begins to understand what it means to connect. "Often hilarious, and ultimately very touching" (People), Group is "a wild ride" (The Boston Globe), and with Christie as our guide, 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.

ISBN-13: 9781982154622

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 06-01-2021

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

Christie Tate is the author of the New York Times bestseller Group, which was a Reese’s Book Club selection. She has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere, and she lives in Chicago with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 The first time I wished for death—like, really wished its bony hand would tap me on the shoulder and say “this way”—two bags from Stanley’s Fruit and Vegetables sat shotgun in my car. Cabbage, carrots, a few plums, bell peppers, onions, and two dozen red apples. It had been three days since my visit to the bursar’s office, where the law school registrar handed me a notecard with my class rank, a number that had begun to haunt me. I turned the key in the ignition and waited for the engine to turn over in the ninety-degree heat. I pulled a plum out of the bag, tested it for firmness, and took a bite. The skin was thick but the flesh beneath was tender. I let the juice dribble down my chin.

It was eight thirty. Saturday morning. I had nowhere to be, nothing to do. No one was expecting to see me until Monday morning, when I’d report for duty at Laird, Griffin & Griffin, the labor law firm where I was a summer intern. At LG&G only the receptionist and the partner who hired me knew I existed. The Fourth of July was Wednesday, which meant I’d face yet another stifling, empty day in the middle of the week. I’d find a 12-step meeting and hope that people would want to go for coffee afterward. Maybe another lonely soul would want to catch a movie or grab a salad. The engine hummed to life, and I gunned the car out of the parking lot.

I wish someone would shoot me in the head.

A soothing thought with a cool obsidian surface. If I died, I wouldn’t have to fill the remaining forty-eight hours of this weekend or Wednesday’s holiday or the weekend after that. I wouldn’t have to endure the hours of hot, heavy loneliness that stretched before me—hours that would turn into days, months, years. A lifetime of nothing but me, a bag of apples, and the flimsy hope that stragglers after a recovery meeting might want some company.

A recent news story about a fatal shooting in Cabrini Green, Chicago’s infamous housing project, flashed in my mind. I steered my car south on Clybourn and turned left on Division. Maybe one of those stray bullets would hit me.

Please, someone shoot me.

I repeated it like a mantra, an incantation, a prayer that would likely go unanswered because I was a twenty-six-year-old white woman in a ten-year-old white Honda Accord on a bright summer morning. Who would shoot me? I had no enemies; I hardly existed. Anyway, that fantasy relied too heavily on luck—bad or good, depending on how you looked at it—but other fantasies came unbidden. Jumping from a high window. Throwing myself on the El tracks. As I came to a stop at Division and Larrabee, I considered more exotic ways to expire, like masturbating while I hung myself, but who was I kidding? I was too repressed for that scenario.

I fished the pit out of the plum and popped the rest in my mouth. Did I really want to die? Where were these thoughts going to lead me? Was this suicidal ideation? Depression? Was I going to act on these thoughts? Should I? I rolled down the window and threw the pit as far as I could.

In my law school application, I described my dream of advocating for women with non-normative (fat) bodies—but that was only partly true. My interest in feminist advocacy was genuine, but it wasn’t the major motivator. I wasn’t after the inflated paychecks or the power suits either. No, I went to law school because lawyers work sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Lawyers schedule conference calls during Christmas break and are summoned to boardrooms on Labor Day. Lawyers eat dinner at their desks surrounded by colleagues with rolled-up sleeves and pit stains. Lawyers can be married to their work—work that is so vital that they don’t mind, or notice, if their personal lives are empty as a parking lot at midnight. Legal work could be a culturally approved-of beard for my dismal personal life.

I took my first practice law school admissions test (LSAT) from the desk where I worked at a dead-end secretarial job. I had a master’s degree I wasn’t using and a boyfriend I wasn’t fucking. Years later, I’d refer to Peter as a workaholic-alcoholic, but at the time I called him the love of my life. I would dial his office at nine thirty at night when I was ready to go to sleep and accuse him of never having time for me. “I have to work,” he’d say, and then hang up. When I’d call back, he wouldn’t answer. On the weekends, we’d walk to dive bars in Wicker Park so he could drink domestic beers and debate the merits of early R.E.M. albums, while I prayed he’d stay sober enough to have sex. He rarely did. Eventually I decided I needed something all-consuming to absorb the energy I was pouring into my miserable relationship. The woman who worked down the hall from me was headed to law school in the fall. “Can I borrow one of your test books?” I asked. I read the first problem:

A professor must schedule seven students during a day in seven different consecutive time periods numbered one through seven.

What followed were a series of statements like: Mary and Oliver must occupy consecutive periods and Sheldon must be scheduled after Uriah. The test directions allotted thirty-five minutes to answer six multiple choice questions about this professor and her scheduling conundrum. It took me almost an hour. I got half of them wrong.

And yet. Slogging through LSAT prep and then law school seemed easier than fixing whatever made me fall in love with Peter and whatever it was that made me stay for the same fight night after night.

Law school could fill all my yearnings to belong to other people, to match my longings with theirs.

At my all-girls high school in Texas, I took a pottery elective freshman year. We started with pinch pots and worked our way up to the pottery wheel. Once we molded our vessels, the teacher taught us how to add handles. If you wanted to attach two pieces of clay—say, the cup and the handle—you had to score the surface of both. Scoring—making horizontal and vertical gouges in the clay—helped the pieces meld together when fired in the kiln. I sat on my stool holding one of my crudely sculpted “cups” and a C-shaped handle as the teacher demonstrated the scoring process. I hadn’t wanted to ruin the smooth surface of the “cup” I’d lovingly pinched, so I smushed the handle on it without scoring its surface. A few days later, our shiny, fired pieces were displayed on a rack in the back of the studio. My cup had survived, but the handle lay in brittle pieces beside it. “Faulty score,” the teacher said when she saw my face fall.

That was how I’d always imagined the surface of my heart—smooth, slick, unattached. Nothing to grab on to. Unscored. No one could attach to me once the inevitable heat of life bore down. I suspected the metaphor went deeper still—that I was afraid of marring my heart with the scoring that arose naturally between people, the inevitable bumping against other people’s desires, demands, pettiness, preferences, and all the quotidian negotiations that made up a relationship. Scoring was required for attachment, and my heart lacked the grooves.

I wasn’t an orphan either, though the first part of this reads like I was. My parents, still happily married, lived in Texas in the same redbrick ranch house I grew up in. If you drove by 6644 Thackeray Avenue, you would see a weathered basketball hoop and a porch festooned with three flags: Old Glory, the Texas state flag, and a maroon flag with the Texas A&M logo on it. Texas A&M was my dad’s alma mater. Mine too.

My parents called a couple times a month to check on me, usually after mass on Sundays. I always went home for Christmas. They bought me a giant green Eddie Bauer coat when I moved to Chicago. My mom sent me fifty-dollar checks so I’d have spending money; my dad diagnosed problems with my Honda’s brakes over the phone. My younger sister was finishing graduate school and about to become engaged to her longtime boyfriend; my brother and his wife, college sweethearts, lived in Atlanta near dozens of their college friends. None of them knew about my unscored heart. To them, I was their oddball daughter and sister who voted Democratic, liked poetry, and settled north of the Mason-Dixon Line. They loved me, but I didn’t really fit with them or Texas. When I was a kid, my mom would play the Aggie fight song on the piano and my dad would sing along at the top of his lungs. Hullaballo-canek-canek, Hullaballoo-canek-canek. He took me on my college tour of Texas A&M, and when I picked it—primarily because we could afford it—he was genuinely thrilled to have another Aggie in the family. He never said so, but surely he was disappointed to learn that I spent home football games in the library highlighting passages in Walden while twenty thousand fans sang, stomped, and cheered loud enough that when the Aggies, scored the library walls vibrated. Everyone in my family and all of Texas, it seemed, loved football.

I was a misfit. The deep secret I carried was that I didn’t belong. Anywhere. I spent half my days obsessing about food and my body and the weird shit I did to control both, and the other half trying to outrun my loneliness with academic achievement. I went from the honor roll in high school to the dean’s list in college for earning a 4.0 for most of my semesters there to cramming legal theories into my brain seven days a week. I dreamed of one day showing up at 6644 Thackeray Avenue at my goal weight, arm in arm with a healthy functioning man, and my spine shooting straight to the sky.

I didn’t think of disclosing to my family when my troubling wishes about death cropped up. We could talk about the weather, the Honda, and the Aggies. None of my secret fears and fantasies fit into any of those categories.

I wished passively for death, but I didn’t stockpile pills or join the Hemlock Society’s mailing list. I didn’t research how to get a gun or fashion a noose out of my belts. I didn’t have a plan, a method, or a date. But I felt an unease, constant as a toothache. It didn’t feel normal, passively wishing that death would snatch me up. Something about the way I was living made me want to stop living.

I don’t remember what words I used when I thought about my malaise. I know I felt a longing I couldn’t articulate and didn’t know how to satisfy. Sometimes I told myself I just wanted a boyfriend or that I was scared I would die alone. Those statements were true. They nicked the bone of the longing, but they didn’t reach the marrow of my despair.

In my journal, I used vague words of discomfort and distress: I feel afraid and anxious about myself. I feel afraid that I’m not OK, will never be OK & I’m doomed. It’s very uncomfortable to me. What’s wrong with me? I didn’t know then that a word existed to perfectly define my malady: lonely.

That card from the bursar with my class rank on it, by the way, said number one. Uno. First. Primero Zuerst. The one hundred seventy other students in my class had a GPA lower than mine. I’d exceeded my goal of landing in the top half of the class, which, after my less-than-mediocre score on the LSAT—I never could figure out when Uriah should have his conference—seemed like a stretch goal. I should have been thrilled. I should have been opening zero-balance credit cards. Shopping for Louboutin heels. Signing the lease on a new apartment on the Gold Coast. Instead, I was first in my class and jealous of the lead singer of INXS who died of autoerotic asphyxiation.

What the hell was wrong with me? I wore size-six pants, had D-cup breasts, and pulled in enough student loan money to cover a studio apartment in an up-and-coming neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. For eight years, I’d been a member of a 12-step program that taught me how to eat without sticking my finger down my throat thirty minutes later. My future gleamed before me like Grandma’s polished silver. I had every reason to be optimistic. But self-disgust about my stuckness—I was far away from other people, aeons away from a romantic relationship—lodged in every cell of my body. There was some reason that I felt so apart and alone, a reason why my heart was so slick. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it pulsing as I fell asleep and wished to not wake up.

I was already in a 12-step program. I’d done a fourth-step inventory with my sponsor who lived in Texas and made amends to the people I’d harmed. I’d returned to Ursuline Academy, my all-girl high school, with a one-hundred-dollar check as restitution for money I stole while managing parking-lot fees junior year. Twelve-step recovery had arrested the worst of my disordered eating, and I credited it with saving my life. Why was I now wishing that life away? I confessed to my sponsor who lived in Texas that I’d been having dark thoughts.

“I wish for death every day.” She told me to double up on my meetings.

I tripled them, and felt more alone than ever.

Show More

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Group includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Christie Tate. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Christie Tate is a high-achieving workaholic with an apartment in an up-and-coming Chicago neighborhood and the highest-ranking student in her law school class. She also spends the majority of her waking hours daydreaming about her death. Bemoaning her inability to be intimate and encouraged by her eccentric therapist, Dr. Rosen, Christie embarks on the mortifying and revitalizing journey that is group therapy. Throughout the course of this addictive, painfully funny memoir, Christie grapples with the challenge of radical honesty as well as Dr. Rosen’s seemingly ludicrous mandates. Baring her soul about everything from her eating disorder to her sexual misadventures, Christie endeavors to believe Dr. Rosen’s promise: in order to embrace the messy realities of human connection, she requires not a cure, but a witness.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Christie begins Group by detailing the first time she “wished for death.” She spends the rest of chapter 1 describing the contrasts of her life—an unwitting outsider might assume she has it all, yet internally she struggles with profound loneliness. Were you surprised to find that Christie could struggle so much with her self-worth given her success? Have you ever felt others’ perception of you did not match your own perception of yourself?

2. One of Christie’s biggest reservations about participating in Dr. Rosen’s group is the fact that secrets are discouraged. How does this central tenet of Dr. Rosen’s group sessions affect the ways she interacts with her fellow members and how she forms relationships with the other patients? Think back to a time in your own life when you committed to something that was emotionally uncomfortable for you. Was it worth the risk?

3. In chapter 6, Christie describes how once during a meeting, no one says a single word for the entire ninety-minute session. What do you think was Dr. Rosen’s intent with this exercise? Is this kind of silence productive or a waste of time?

4. When Christie leaves an indignant voice mail on Dr. Rosen’s answering machine, he uses the moment to “celebrate” her anger (p. 93). What are the benefits of uplifting feelings that are, in Christie’s words, “ugly, irrational, petty, reckless, spiteful, and spewing” (p. 94)? How does expressing this anger freely affect her relationship with Dr. Rosen and the group?

5. Recall some examples of where the body as a site of externalized trauma figures prominently in Group. Can you think of reasons why Christie’s reaction to pain is sometimes so physical?

6. Christie recounts the dysfunctional and frustrating details of several romantic and sexual relationships throughout Group. What lessons does she learn from each affair, and how are they demonstrated in not only her love life but also her life in general? Could you relate to any of her relationship struggles in particular?

7. Dr. Rosen’s methods are unorthodox, and Christie expresses doubt about their effectiveness throughout the memoir. This is especially true when Christie dates Dr. Rosen’s other patients, Jeremy and Reed. Do you think Dr. Rosen ever oversteps boundaries or becomes too invasive? Do you agree with how Dr. Rosen distinguishes between keeping a secret, which is toxic, and maintaining privacy or having boundaries, which is not necessarily unhealthy?

8. In chapter 28, Christie and Max engage in an intense fight in front of Dr. Rosen and the other group members during a session. At the end of the chapter, they reconcile with a wordless hug. How do these moments of catharsis influence Christie’s feelings about and openness toward relationships?

9. When he offers to hold Christie after she and Brandon break up, Dr. Rosen observes, “You’re on the edge of a new identity and a new way of thinking about yourself” (p. 243). Can you think of inflection points in your life when you reevaluated the way you exist in the world?

10. Soon after Christie vows to say “yes” more and reclaim her voice in her daily life, she reaches out to John, resulting at long last in a healthy, loving relationship. In what ways is Christie’s therapy about understanding and respecting herself? How do those two concepts—attaching to others and connecting to yourself—interact?

11. The three parts of Group correspond to the three groups Christie joins along her therapy journey. Reflect back on how Christie and her approach to the struggles she faces evolve over the course of the book. In your opinion, what are some key moments that demonstrate to you that group therapy was working for Christie?

12. Christie’s relationship with her three groups—the members within them and the dynamic as a whole—defines her transformation from a loner with an “unscored heart” (p. 7) to someone who accepts help when she struggles to “tell the truth of [her] desire” (p. 275). Think about your own “group,” whatever that means to you: it could be friends, family, community members, coworkers, and beyond. How have those individuals contributed to your growth? If you could thank them for the role they have played in your life, what would you say? In what ways has your own group served as a witness for you as you struggle, both through quotidian challenges and major life upheavals?

13. For readers who have never experienced group therapy: After reading Group, why do you think Christie felt moved to share her experience? Did the book change any preconceived notions you had about group therapy? Do you think you would be a good candidate for this type of therapy? Why or why not?

14. For readers who have experienced group therapy: What did you appreciate about Christie’s depiction of group therapy in Group? Is/was your experience similar or different? How so?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Split your book club members into four groups and assign one of Christie’s former boyfriends—Jeremy, Alex, Reed, and Brandon—to each group. Discuss the trajectory of each relationship, the lessons Christie learned, and your reaction to each man’s behavior. If you were Christie, would you have acted similarly, or would you have made different decisions in the course of the relationship? If Christie were your friend, what advice would you give her? Come back as a big group to share what you discussed.

2. As a group, brainstorm a list of memoirs about therapy and/or mental health. In terms of tone, narration, and structure, how are these selections different from or similar to Group? You can also expand the list to include fiction, film, and other art forms that depict characters battling mental illness.

3. There are a wealth of colorful characters in this book, including Christie, Dr. Rosen, the group members, and her flings. As a book club, cast a film adaption of Group. Who would best inhabit each role and why?

A Conversation with Christie Tate

Q: This is not only your debut—it’s also an extremely vulnerable memoir about how you learned to be vulnerable with others. What inspired you to write Group? Did you have qualms about disclosing your life to an even wider circle of strangers?

A: I started Group in November 2015 after writing a novel that was a mess I didn’t know how to fix. The worst part about the novel is that it ended with a terrible sex scene between the protagonist and her therapist, and Dr. Rosen had me bring the manuscript into group and read the sex scene. I can still hear my group mates’ groans. With my disastrous novel on my hands, I took a month off from writing and read everything I could get my hands on about how to write a novel. Then, one day I could see the whole arc of Group: from driving around dreaming of death to dancing at my wedding with my new husband, family, friends, Dr. Rosen, and my group members. Because I could see it so clearly, I had the courage to begin writing.

Oh yes I did have qualms. Honestly, I still do at times. I wonder if I’m making a jackass of myself by telling the world how I acted like a fool all those years. Most days I’m grateful for the qualms because they remind me that I’ve told the truth. Hemingway emphasized the importance of “writing hard and clear about what hurts.” The qualms tell me I’ve done that. As I was writing, fears would rise up, and I would turn to my literary and artistic heroes who write candidly about themselves and their bodies. Lidia Yuknavitch, Kiese Laymon, Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby, and Sarah Hepola. And beyond books, I felt inspired by women writers and comics like Ali Wong, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Leslie Jones. Their stories about their bodies, desires, sex lives, sorrows, struggles, and ambition have entertained and comforted me. They’ve also made me uncomfortable. They’ve changed how I understand myself and my body. True stories are a gift to the world, and I committed to offering mine because I’ve loved others who did it before me. It’s scary, of course, but it should be. I respect readers enough to tell them stories that scare me.

Q: In chapter 4, we meet the first group members who will accompany your journey to a scored heart. By the book’s end, you’ve participated in volatile confrontations, called members to confess when you binged or masturbated, and dished the unsavory details of many romantic duds. How do friendships created in group differ from friendships you make outside of therapy? How have group members featured in the book reacted?

A: When I think about my relationships with my group members, I want to invent a whole new language. When you’ve screamed into someone’s gaping mouth or called them while still naked after disappointing sex with a man you don’t particularly like, the word “friend” feels too flimsy—it’s too “Snoopy and Woodstock on a Friendship Day” greeting card. The word “family” isn’t right either, because there’s no one in my family I’d call under those delicate circumstances. The people in my group have seen me literally yank the hair out of my head and cry until my snot ran into the ugly brown carpet in Rosen’s office. None of my friends outside of group have seen that. Sure, I can describe it after a session, but it’s not the same as being a real-time witness. Once you’ve been in group with someone, you have hundreds of inside jokes and a shorthand that is hard to develop in friendships where you don’t sit together for one hundred eighty minutes each week learning to get real. It’s very hard to re-create that deep-in-my-bones intimacy outside of group. I’ve done it with my husband and my children, but hardly any other people.

I sent my group mates an early draft. They all seemed vaguely amused I wanted to tell this story. Only two of them read it. None of us thought it would go anywhere. Once I revised the manuscript three more times and got an agent, I sent them an updated draft. In group, we discussed what it would mean if my book about our group was published. Several members were worried that I’d outed them or disclosed their personal issues. I revised the manuscript again, excising anything personal about my group mates. I wasn’t willing to put a book out that harmed my relationship with any of them. Four of my group mates read the updated manuscript and reported feeling relieved how I protected their privacy. One guy reported feeling hurt he wasn’t featured more prominently, and another member didn’t read it because he doesn’t want it to get in the way of our relationship. At times, it was excruciating to hear their projections or fears that I would exploit them or hear them wish I wasn’t writing about group at all. But as you would expect, we worked through the issues over many sessions, and they, along with Dr. Rosen, helped me navigate the issues of privacy, disclosure, and truth telling.

Q: Dr. Rosen is many things: Harvard educated, infuriatingly confident in his unconventional methods, and a stickler for his “no secrets” directive. What was it like to reckon your evolving relationship with Dr. Rosen on the page? Would you encourage skeptical readers to embrace some facets of his unique approach?

A: In some ways, writing about Dr. Rosen was the easiest because he’s so extreme and unconventional. Those early memories and conflicts are seared into my brain because they were so strange. I remember the white shirt he was wearing when he leaned in and told me to pray that he dies. A writer dreams for someone as startling and peculiar as Dr. Rosen to enter her life. And because his entire life’s work is to help addicts and stuck people let go of their secrets, I always knew I had full permission to write anything I wanted to about him. That kind of radical freedom allowed me to pour my memories onto the page. Plus, I still see him twice a week and get a front row seat to his mannerisms and personality: the shrugs, the mazel tovs, that laugh.

He’s so uniquely and consistently himself—so odd, so unashamed of his unorthodox methods, so arrogant, and so committed to his beliefs—that he never grew hazy in my memory. He’s entertaining to write because who could believe this guy? Get a henna tattoo on your belly that says “I hate my breasts”? Bookend your masturbation? The stories almost write themselves.

I know from the reactions I got from friends outside of group or writers who read early drafts of the book that people will have very strong reactions to Dr. Rosen. The word I hear most often in relation to him from outsiders is abusive. Someone once wrote me to explain how abusive it was for Dr. Rosen and his wife to attend my wedding, even though John and I invited them. I hear all the time that it was abusive for him to “allow” me to date Reed. Other therapists who hear these stories and practice differently give me major side-eye when I share how Dr. Rosen operates. And I totally get it. I know the Rosen-world is not familiar or comfortable for everyone. I’ve had friends schedule a session with Dr. Rosen, see him once, and then decide he’s not for them. Too weird. Too out there. Too intense. Some people, because of their history, do not feel safe in a therapeutic setting that does not offer strict confidentiality. And I totally respect that. I’m certainly not advocating this therapeutic setting for everyone.

I would encourage skeptical readers to consider whether an additional amount of disclosure—whether a group of their own choosing, a friend, a spouse, an individual therapist—might bring them a measure of freedom and release from shame. I truly believe that the closer we hold a secret, the sicker we become. The secret takes over our lives and separates us from other people. The deepest, most crippling secret I carried had nothing to do with breaking laws or hurting animals or sexual deviance. My secret was my nightly binges on eight to ten apples. I believe I could have leaped forward in my life if I could have told someone from my 12-step program about my Red Delicious addiction. But I had too much ego, fear, and shame to tell the truth before group. There’s no reason people can’t practice self-disclosure outside of a formal therapy group. And anyone can turn over their food—or spending, fantasizing, masturbating, gambling—to another person. You just need a cell phone or e-mail address and a consenting witness.

Q: Much of Group is devoted to the embarrassing, painful pitfalls inherent to navigating sex and relationships, and you don’t hold back. How does it feel to share intensely intimate moments—sex dreams,