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

Tate uses the symbol of a scored heart as a controlling metaphor to mark her emotional progress throughout the memoir. Tate establishes this metaphor by relating an experience she had in a high school pottery class, where clay handles had to be scored, or cut into at the attachment site, if they were to stick to mugs fired in a kiln. In this class, Christie fails to score her handles, and they fall right off during the firing process. She then relates this experience to the state of her heart and the importance and difficulties of forming connections. She says, “That was how I'd always imagined the surface of my heart—smooth, slick, unattached. Nothing to grab onto” (6). This establishes her goals for therapy. She's looking for experiences that will open her heart and help her to attach.

Toward the end of the memoir, Tate writes, “My heart, a messy, pulpy thing, was scored from each attempt, each near miss, each lunge towards other people, those who loved me back and those who didn't” (248). There is a marked difference between the character who can embrace her mistakes in dating and her flaws of anger and self-harm and the character who was too afraid to form connections in Chapter 1.