Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

And we are so excited to welcome New York Times bestselling author Christy Tate to this episode.

Christy is the author of The New Book, Group,

How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life.

The book is described as the memoir of a guarded, overachieving, self-lacerating young lawyer

who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of

six complete strangers, her psychotherapy group, and in turn finds human connection and herself.

Christy, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Tell us how this book came about.

Sure.

So I've been in therapy for many years and I still go, actually.

And I had started to try writing and I found that I really loved it.

And I tried my hand out a couple of novels that were really, really not good.

And after I talked about one of them in my group, somebody said something that

just triggered me. They said, why don't you just tell the true story? Instead of writing these characters

that are lonely lawyers that have these relationships with their therapists, it became clear that the

real story was trying to come out

in my writing and I was resisting. I didn't think I was important enough of a person to write a

memoir. And then I finally just decided, well, let's just see what the true story is and let me see

...