This reading group guide for B.F.F. 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 proved herself to be a master at laying bare the messy shames of her own psyche with her New York Times bestselling debut memoir, Group, and her knack for excruciating vulnerability is at the forefront of B.F.F. Here, we learn about the fraught family history and destructive jealousy that would follow Tate into adulthood, as well as meet the cast of characters with whom she falls in and out of friendship throughout her life. Chief among them is Meredith, a woman Tate meets in recovery who becomes her cheerleader and fellow commiserater in a shared journey to stronger female friendships. Over decades of morning diner dates, desperate texts, and seismic life events, Tate and Meredith navigate their debilitating insecurities and regrets of friendships past, working together to transform their relationships with women. When Meredith is diagnosed with cancer, Tate honors her by striving to be the friend she deserves until her final days. B.F.F. is a razor-sharp and delightfully funny interrogation of the blind spots that plague us all, as well as a deeply heartwarming book that asks how we can strive to show up for the people we love most.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

The prologue describes Tate giving a eulogy at Meredith’s funeral. How would your experience of B.F.F. have been impacted had Tate simply begun with meeting Meredith in chapter 1—in other words, if you didn’t know that Meredith would die by the book’s end? What is gained with that knowledge?

Excavating her childhood friendships—as well as her relationship to her sister—is a vital part of Tate’s healing work. How does Tate’s approach to friendship evolve from the playground to Catholic school to college and beyond? How is her family life and dynamic with men inextricable from this? Can you identify similar patterns in your life?

In chapter 6, Tate experiences a turning point in the way she thinks about shame, “apartness,” and friendship. How does Tate build tension during the scene at dinner, and after? Have you ever had a similar moment of realization?

At the end of chapter 14, Meredith asks Tate to “write a vision for ourselves in friendship . . . a map for where we’re going (100).” Try this exercise yourself. What do you discover?

B.F.F. covers trauma, mental illness, sickness, and death—yet the tone of the book isn’t heavy or dour. How would you describe Tate’s sense of humor? How does it impact your reading of the book, especially the more difficult topics?

Consider the questions Tate asks herself after seeing Meredith for the last time (232). Do any of them resonate with you?

Tate divides B.F.F. into three sections: “Part I: What It Was Like,” “Part II: What Happened,” and “Part III: What It’s Like Now.” How does this structure orient you in Tate’s story? Reflect back on how Tate evolves over the course of the book. In your opinion, what are some of her most significant moments of growth?

Think about the major friendships Tate dramatizes in B.F.F.—for example, with Lia, Callie, and Anna. Which did you find the most emotionally or narratively compelling? Why do you think that is?

B.F.F. ends with a series of letters addressed to Meredith that chronicle Tate’s continuing friendship journey. What is the rhetorical effect of this? Are there any achievements in the letters that feel particularly triumphant for you?

If you could distill three lessons that Tate learns in B.F.F., what would they be? What will you take away from her story?

Enhance Your Book Club

As a group, brainstorm other memoirs and books that depict complicated female friendships. What do these selections share in common with B.F.F.? What did you appreciate about Tate’s specific story and approach?

Discuss some of the friend breakups Tate experiences throughout her life. Split up into pairs and assign roles—one person is Tate, while the other person is one of her friends. Using the context you learned from B.F.F., write a reconciliation conversation between the women and then present it to the group. What does each women have to atone for in order to remedy the relationship? How can you demonstrate character development?

It’s time to cast the B.F.F. movie or miniseries! Choose your top picks for Tate, Meredith, and the other friends in Tate’s life—and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character.

A Conversation with Christie Tate

What did you bring from your experience writing Group to your experience writing B.F.F.? On a craft level, how were the processes different? Did one feel scarier or more vulnerable to publish than the other?

When I first published Group, I thought there was no way any subsequent book would be as emotionally harrowing to write. What, I wondered, could be scarier than writing about all the bad sex I had during my twenties and early thirties? But within two weeks of starting B.F.F. I realized that it would be more vulnerable and terrifying to write about my relationships with women. The vulnerability at the center of Group revolved largely around my fears of intimacy with men, and it was easy to hide behind the emotionally unavailable boyfriends and compromising situations I put myself in. With friendship, I felt like there was no hiding; the friends I struggled to connect were loving and generous, if messy and wounded in many of the same ways I was. My behavior in friendship was so rarely conducive to building healthy bonds, and the trouble with friends started long before my trouble with boys, and it also lasted much longer. In truth, I struggle to this day with all the lessons I learned in the book—direct communication, boundaries, envy, and scarcity. Thus, I found that revealing my bad behavior as a friend, where I was often a perpetrator, felt much more vulnerable than my bad behavior as a girlfriend, where I perpetually saw myself as a victim. Moreover, I no longer have a relationship with any of the ex-boyfriends who appear in Group, but I’m still connected with most of the friends I write about in B.F.F. What could be more vulnerable than having ongoing relationships with friends who’ve seen me at my worst? Those friends—Callie, Anna, Lia—witnessed my behavior when I lacked the skills to do better and before I’d addressed my emotional blocks. To tell the world how I’ve faltered and then rehabilitated my role as friend to these incredible women who remain in my life is scarier than any tale of a bad blow job to a guy I’ll never seen again.

Did you have a method for writing the passages about your childhood?

Absolutely. First, I would convince myself that no one would ever read any of the passages I’d write. This was step one because I couldn’t possibly get the words on the page if I thought about my words one day appearing in a published book. Then, I made a list of all the scenes I couldn’t possibly write for all the reasons people avoid writing memoir: Someone might get upset, mad, or hurt. Someone might abandon me. I might not remember it correctly. I might be wrong. Then, one by one, I wrote those scenes as I remembered them, careful to include phrases to indicate to the reader that my memories, like all memories, were highly fallible. From there, I revised the scenes to ensure they reflected my experience and granted as much privacy as possible to the members of my family, especially those who are not keen to appear on the pages of my memoir. When I’d whittled the scenes down to the ones that were essentially for the story of B.F.F., I prayed, snacked, cried, gnashed my teeth, talked to other writers, threw rocks in Lake Michigan, discussed the project in therapy, and then finally: I lit a candle, prayed for the willingness to give myself permission to write what I needed to write with integrity, gratitude, honesty, and humility. Then, more snacks. I should probably give Trader Joe’s a cut of the profits.

Was there a particular moment or scene that was especially easy or pleasurable to write?

I loved writing about Meredith. Every time I found her on the page, I had the pleasure of spending time with her again. As I drafted scenes to highlight how complex, glorious, loving, and stubborn she was in real life, I felt her come alive. Even now, I remember where I was when I drafted the scene when I told her I’d ghosted Callie (in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas); when I wrote my first letter to her that appears at the end of the book (Harold Washington Library, fourth floor); and when I wrote about the day I visited her in the hospital (at my dining room table). The pure joy of writing those letters was a total surprise and a full-body joy infusion that I’d never experienced in writing before or since.

What about one that was particularly difficult or fraught?

Writing about attending a recovery meeting with my family as a little girl was as fraught as any scene I’ve ever written in my life. Ten times harder than any sex scene. When writing about someone else’s recovery, I have to balance the needs of the story with my family member’s right to anonymity and privacy. With B.F.F., I couldn’t tell the story of why I struggled as a friend without telling the story of how I struggled as a sister. And that scene—where I heard my dad call my sister a “miracle” in a recovery meeting, solidifying my deep feeling of inferiority because he didn’t also call me a “miracle”—had to be in the story. There were moments early on during the drafting when I thought I couldn’t write this book because I didn’t know if I had the courage to navigate all the tender relationships and ethical principles involved in writing about someone else’s recovery. Even writing this recap makes me feel tingly with anxiety.

Since the hardcover publication of B.F.F., have you experienced any new facets to your friendships that you would like to explore in future writing? Do you have any new friendship goals for yourself?

Yes! I would like to explore my friendships with men, which is a question I fielded from many readers: What about your friendships with men? Every Wednesday for the past few years, I’ve met up with two male friends at a coffee shop near my house—during the pandemic we sat outside, shivering and sipping coffee under our masks. I protect that time the same way I protect my therapy time and family time. We get our lattes and then we gossip, dissect our spouses’ foibles, debate the merits of Succession and the merits of Richard Marx’s discography. I notice that with these two men, I don’t have the same neurotic fear of being in a friendship triangle. I’m still teasing out what makes these coffee dates different than the ones I have with my girlfriends, where I’m still so obviously a work in progress. As for friendship goals, they remain modest: Show up for my friends, and when I can’t, be honest about my limitations as soon as possible.

What do you think Meredith would think of B.F.F.?

Shortly after Meredith and I both saw a Chicago production Hamilton, we had a little tiff. I was angry that she was not standing up for herself at work. She kept insisting that she had to just suck it up because she was lucky to be employed at a world-famous treatment center. “You know what your problem is?” I yelled at her. “You think you’re a Peggy, but you’re an Angelica!”—referring to the two Schuyler sisters, one of whom is barely a footnote in the musical (Peggy), while the other gets to take center stage to rap about Ben Franklin and clamor for women’s rights. We’d been walking down Washington Street toward the redline train. She stopped and stared at me for a long moment, tears pooling in her eyes. “You really think I’m an Angelica?” I wanted to grab her by the neck and give her a noogie. Of course, she was an Angelica. She had a bazillion years of sobriety, made straight As in her master’s program, and had almost sixty years of experience to share with patients seeking relief from addiction. But she saw herself as the sister that no one cared about, the forgotten footnote. If she knew there was a book about her in the world, she’d be so shocked she’d laugh until she cried, and then cry until she was laughing again. She might even let me buy her a bottle of San Pellegrino. The big one.

If you could describe your ideal self in a friendship in five words or less, what would they be?

Christie: honest, messy, humble, willing.

What advice about friendship would you give young Christie? What about to a reader who finds themselves struggling to maintain lasting friendships?

To young Christie I would say: “Your friendships are just as important as your romantic relationships.” I’d point out that her rabid fixation on finding a suitable, long-term boyfriend—thank you, Patriarchy—was not serving her. She’d bat me away, but I’d double down and tell her that even though culture has convinced her that the only relationship that matters is the romantic one, culture is often deadly wrong (see: slavery, Japanese detention camps, miscegenation laws, Antisemitic zoning laws, mixing powdered French onion soup into sour cream to create a “fancy” dip for dinner parties). I’d whisper to her that she should figure out what’s blocking her from loving her friends with her whole, messy heart, and then encourage her to put her money, time, and energy into removing that block. “You deserve rich, intimate friendships, but they don’t just happen. You have to work for them. They are worth it.”