Lori Gottlieb
2022
From a New York Times bestselling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world—where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone which is being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. Her TED Talk was one of the top 10 most watched of the year. A member of the Advisory Council for Bring Change to Mind, she is a sought-after expert in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The CBS This Morning, CNN, and NPR’s Fresh Air. She is also the co-host of the new iHeart Radio podcast, “Dear Therapists,” produced by Katie Couric.
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 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 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 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 and offers the rarest of gifts: a portrait of what it means to be human, and a funny, illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.