A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
by Lori Gottlieb
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2019
432 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. Saturated with self-awareness and compassion, this is an irresistibly addictive tour of the human condition." - Kirkus
"Written with grace, humor, wisdom, and compassion, this [is a] heartwarming journey of self-discovery." - Library Journal
"Veteran psychotherapist and New York Times best-selling author Lori Gottlieb shares a candid and remarkably relatable account of what it means to be a therapist who also goes to therapy, and what this can teach us about the universality of our questions and anxieties." - Thrive Global, "10 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019"
"Some people are great writers, and other people are great therapists. Lori Gottlieb is, astoundingly, both...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
"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." - Susan Cain, New York Times best-selling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
"Warm, funny, and engaging (no poker-faced clinician here), Gottlieb not only gives us an unvarnished look at her patients' lives, but also her own. The result is the most relatable portrait of a therapist I've yet encountered." - Susannah Cahalan New York Times best-selling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
"Gottlieb is an utterly compelling narrator: funny, probing, savvy, vulnerable. She pays attention to the small stuff — the box of tissues and the Legos in the carpet — as she honors the more expansive mysteries of our wild, aching hearts." - Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
"This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book...Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is funny, hopeful, wise, and engrossing—all at the same time." - Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post and founder & CEO, Thrive Global
"Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is ingenious, inspiring, tender, and funny. Lori Gottlieb bravely takes her readers on a guided tour into the self, showing us the therapeutic process from both sides of the couch - as both therapist and patient. I cheered for her breakthroughs, as if they were my own! This is the best book I've ever read about the life-changing possibilities of talk therapy." - Amy Dickinson, "Ask Amy" advice columnist and New York Times best-selling author of Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things
"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." - Sarah Hepola, New York Times best-selling author of Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
"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." - Lisa Damour, New York Times best-selling author of Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
"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." - Irvin Yalom MD, author of Love's Executioner, and other Tales of Psychotherapy, and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University.
"Here are some people who might benefit from Lori Gottlieb's illuminating new book: Therapists, people who have been in therapy, people who have been in relationships, people who have experienced emotions. In other words, everyone. Lori's story is funny, enlightening, and radically honest. It merits far more than 50 minutes of your time." - A.J. Jacobs, New York Times best-selling author of The Year of Living Biblically
This information about Maybe You Should Talk to Someone was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author who writes The Atlantic's weekly "Dear Therapist" advice column. A contributing editor at The Atlantic, she also writes for The New York Times Magazine, and has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN, and NPR. Learn more at LoriGottlieb.com or by following her @LoriGottlieb1 on Twitter.
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