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

“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.”

Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life starts with this in media res sentence. In media res is an ancient Greek literary technique that starts the story in the middle of the action. The beginning of Christie’s day was finding out her class rank, but by beginning here instead, she is able to focus on the real conflict (death), create powerful imagery, and immediately establish the stakes.

“If we were a tampon commercial, I’d be the one scowling about odors and leakage; she’d be doing a jeté in white jeans on her heavy flow day.”

Tate uses the analogy of characters in a tampon commercial to convey her differing perceptions of Marnie and herself. Borrowing the clichéd imagery of marketing aimed at women, which often compares someone successful to someone struggling, conveys the success Christie perceives in Marnie and the struggling she perceives in herself.

“To open up, I needed a therapist who could hear the echoes of pain in my silences.”

In this passage, Tate uses the paradox of hearing silence to convey what she needs in a therapist. The impossibility of hearing something with no sound represents the difficulty Tate believes she will have in finding the right therapist. It also foreshadows the rare insightfulness that Dr. Rosen brings to his treatment strategies.