INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Now being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria and ABC! “Rarely have I read a book that challenged me to see myself in an entirely new light, and was at the same time laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absorbing.”–Katie Couric “This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book.”–Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post and Founder … book.”–Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post and Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
“Wise, warm, smart, and funny. You must read this book.”–Susan Cain, New York Times best-selling author of Quiet
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 ofÂfice 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 revÂolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply perÂsonal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealÂing 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.
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This will without a doubt be one of my favorite books of the year. It’s written by a therapist about her work with four of her patients as well as her own therapist. If anything about therapy and how it works sounds intriguing to you — or if you’ve ever secretly wished you could listen in on someone else’s therapy sessions — I recommend picking this one up!
I highly recommend this book, but be prepared that it may lead to uncomfortable, and maybe even life-changing levels of introspection.
Really, really good. Brings life into focus and left me feeling the slightest bit wiser.
With wisdom and humanity, Lori Gottlieb invites us into her consulting room, and her therapist’s. There, readers will share in one of the best-kept secrets of being a clinician: when we bear witness to change, we also change, and when we are present as others find meaning in their lives, we also discover more in our own.
Scanning reviews for this book, I came across one stating the reader didn’t get the point. Having spent the last hundred pages alternately sobbing and laughing and almost having to take a nap to recover, I really did have to wonder if that reader had gotten past the first page. Or the cover copy. I mean, the book IS the point.
I read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone on the advice of a book buddy. I’m interested in what goes on in therapy and thought a book from the perspective of a therapist also seeking therapy was unique. There’s a thought, or a collection of them, really, later in the book where the author muses over how being in therapy herself has helped her be a better therapist and I could totally see that. Reading makes me a better writer – or, at the very least, makes me more curious about how other writers do it.
What I enjoyed most were the stories of the author’s clients. They broke my heart and put it back together again with new insight and a deeper appreciation for story. For being human. Unlike most novels, I couldn’t guess going in how each of these separate narratives would turn out. I had hopes, but real life doesn’t always pay attention to what we wish for.
I also loved the way Ms. Gottleib’s story, and why she sought therapy, changed how she related to her clients. She grew with them. There is nothing more satisfying than growth – to have a journey have meant something.
I enjoyed the exploration of uncertainty and paused to examine the concept in relation to my own life and the choices I was making – or not making.
I enjoyed the author’s voice and am inspired to read more of her work.
What I loved most, though, was the inevitability I grew to suspect somewhere in the middle, about how the journey described would become the process of the actual writing of the book. Which left me wondering how anyone might not see the point of it all.
Highly recommended. This is going to be the book I buy for people this year.
As a clinical psychologist, one of my biggest beefs is the way shrinks are often portrayed in books and movies as buffoons with poor boundaries, often more disturbed than the patients they are supposed to be helping. Lori Gottlieb’s book stems that tide–it’s the clearest and most interesting description of how psychotherapy works that I’ve read. We follow four of her regular patients from first appearance to the end of treatment, and we also follow the therapist’s therapy. She is honest, emotional, thoughtful, and full of hope. And best of all, the book reads like a novel–a good one! Highly recommended.
I’d read about this book, and it seemed both different and interesting, which turned out to be exactly right. Therapist Lori Gottlieb gives you an inside look at some of her cases, as well as detailing her relationship with her own therapist. Not only does if feel juicy and gossipy in a good way, but there are so many interesting insights. I gobbled this up in two days.
A sensitive, honest, funny, sad, entertaining and educational memoir that accurately and compassionately captures the essence of therapy and the experience of growth, change and insight. Highly recommended!
Oh this book was a great read. It reads so much like a novel. Lori Gottlieb is a wonderful writer and I will be looking into other books written by Lori. I think this book would be a good book for everyone to read. So much great insight into what therapist do and how they help you help yourself. I laughed and cried throughout this book. I struggled with Lori in trying to understand what Boyfriend was thinking. I cheered Julie and cried with her. John was maybe the one I was most interested in as I know people who act as he does. So what I am saying is there is a little bit of everyone you know in this amazing book.
Satisfying and enlightening on so many levels…I kept coming back to Lori Gottlieb’s therapy room for more of the good stuff she delivers throughout this wonderful book. I found myself thinking about the characters (Gottlieb herself as well as her patients) as if I really knew them, rooting for them to keep growing, while identifying with their struggles, pain, and joys. And I am reading more about the people she quotes. Today it was Viktor Frankl. Thank you, Lori Gottlieb!
If you have even an ounce of interest in the therapeutic process, or in the conundrum of being human, you must read this book. It is wise, warm, smart and funny, and Lori Gottlieb is exceedingly good company.
I’ve been reading books about psychotherapy for over a half century, but never have I encountered a book like Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: so bold and brassy, so packed with good stories, so honest, deep and riveting. I intended to read a chapter or two but ended up reading and relishing every word.
Profoundly moving, charming, and thoroughly absorbing, this is the book I’ve needed throughout 2020 and didn’t even know about. I’m so glad I found it now. I highly recommend.
I had a hard time starting this book because I just don’t like the cover. But, as they say, don’t judge a book…Anyway, I’m glad I could get past the cover because this book is wonderful! Lori Gottlieb is a warm and intuitive and compelling writer. This book is so much more than even the subtitle reveals. I was surprisingly enchanted by the subject and subjects contained within these pages.
I love, love, loved this book, written by a psychologist about her own therapy sessions after the man she was planning to marry dumped her. Well-written and insightful.
This was such a well-written, well-researched book. In a nutshell, Lori intertwined her experience with her therapist into several stories about her own therapy patients. The stories made me both cry and laugh and want to get to know her patients. The book gave me a new appreciation for psychotherapists, and reading it was like my own form of therapy. By sharing the struggles that her patients (and herself) have gone through, it’s easy to see universal themes and relate to their struggles as well as their healing. I highly recommend this book. It was tough to put down because I began to root for her patients’ recovery.
Whether you’re seeing a therapist or not this interesting book reads like a novel but at the same time allows the reader to peek into the personal and touching relationships between a therapist who not only is helping her troubled patients but at the same time is working to resolve her own problems .
This book gave me insights into the world of talk therapy. Lori has an engaging writing style.
An excellent book on the nature of therapy and the therapist as well two wonderful aspects are mentioned insight is the booby prize of therapy and the most crucial belief from Victor Frankl the only freedom we have is to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances
I was sucked right in to these vivid, funny, illuminating stories of humans trying to climb their way out of hiding, overcome self-defeating habits, and wake up to their own strength. Lori Gottlieb has captured something profound about the struggle, and the miracle, of human connection.