Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
2019
- psychotherapists
- biography
- therapist and patient
- psychology
- psychotherapy biography & autobiography
- personal memoirs
- self-help
- personal growth
- happiness
- family & relationships
The story
From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world—where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she). One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them. ([source](https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/maybe-you-should-talk-to-someone/9781328663047))
What it’s like
Wry, unhurried and intimate, like sitting across from a candid friend over tea in a book-lined office. The prose is conversational and quick-witted, moving easily between clinical observation and self-deprecating confession, with the sensory world kept to lamplit rooms, a worn armchair, and the everyday texture of Los Angeles traffic and waiting rooms. Chapters alternate between the author's sessions with patients and her own sessions with her therapist, so the pace is steady and reflective, with laughter arriving as often as tears. Vibe: warm, funny, quietly searching, the feeling of being let in on a wise confidant's secrets. It suits a rainy Sunday, a long-haul flight, or a late evening when you want company in your own thoughts. Emotional register is candid and humane rather than bleak. Patients face serious struggles, including terminal illness, suicidal thoughts, and heartbreak, handled with compassion and restraint; no graphic violence, and sexual content stays brief and non-explicit. For readers who want honest, funny reflection on how people change, and who like memoir that doubles as a gentle guide to psychology.
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