#123 Writing About Trauma Using Timelines, Throughlines, and Imagery Featuring Christie Tate

Christie Tate is an essayist and author who writes creative nonfiction and memoir. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Group, which was a Reese’s Book Club selection and has been translated into 19 languages. She is also the author of B.F.F.-- A Memoir of Friendship Lost & Found. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Her essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and Kiese Laymon selected her essay, Promised Lands, as the winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2019 nonfiction contest. She writes about addiction, eating disorders, friendship, alienation, recovery, and her Grandma’s farm in Forreston, Texas. She grew up in Dallas and now lives in Chicago with her family. She has finally stopped telling people that she graduated first in her law school class. Please don’t hate her because she has no pets.

 

In This Episode:

• The inspiration behind Christie’s memoir, Group, and its impact on readers worldwide [3:08]

• The inciting incident that drove the rest of her book [4:24]

• How she initially started with a prologue that became her ending and why she made that choice [5:41]

• Why vulnerability and honesty are crucial in her storytelling [6:02]

• The ticking time bomb that informed her memoir and why that’s key to building dramatic tension [7:37]

• How group therapy transformed her life and how ‘prescriptions’ offered a structure for her writing [8:54]

• The key to using detail and specificity to bring readers into the story [11:33]

• Her advice for aspiring writers: go where  the “heat” is, and how to do that [28:13]

• How Christie found her throughline and worked it into the memoir [29:27]

• The power of images in writing [32:36]

• What to do when you get stuck and how being a reader before a writer, helps [33:54]

 

Connect with Christie Tate

Website: https://www.christietate.com/

Books: https://www.christietate.com/writetogetherworkshops-1

 

Buy Group on Estelle’s Bookshop 

https://bookshop.org/p/books/group-how-one-therapist-and-a-circle-of-strangers-saved-my-life-christie-tate/15065918?ean=9781982154622

 

Connect with Estelle Erasmus

 

Her latest substack Post: My Predictions for Publishing in 2025

https://estelleserasmus.substack.com/p/my-predictions-for-publishing-for

 

Apply to be on Freelance Writing Direct in a coaching episode: email [e-mail] and state three of the issues you are dealing w