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What it argues
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist who, after a sudden and shattering breakup, found herself in therapy of her own. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone tells the story of that year in parallel: Gottlieb sitting across from her own therapist, Wendell, while continuing to see her own patients. The result is a book that operates simultaneously as memoir, patient case studies, and a meditation on what therapy actually is — not a cure for unhappiness but a sustained encounter with your own patterns of thinking and relating.
The book's structure is its greatest strength. Gottlieb weaves between her own therapy, where she is working through grief, self-deception, and questions about what she actually wants from her life, and her work with four patients: a self-righteous Hollywood producer who cannot see his own role in his problems, a young woman dying of cancer, a depressed newlywed who drinks too much, and a seventy-something woman who has been threatening to end her life before she turns seventy. Each patient story is a case study in a different kind of change and resistance, and each one illuminates the parallel narrative of Gottlieb's own process.
What it gets right
- 1.
Therapy is not primarily about insight — it is about changing behavior and relationship patterns, which requires different work than simply understanding them.
- 2.
Most people enter therapy wanting to change their circumstances or the people around them. The actual work is always about changing oneself.
- 3.
Therapists are not objective guides; they bring their own histories, blind spots, and reactions into the room. Good therapy acknowledges this rather than pretending otherwise.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Lori Gottlieb is an American psychotherapist and writer who practices in Los Angeles and writes the "Dear Therapist" column for The Atlantic. She trained at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and holds a Master's degree in clinical psychology. Before becoming a therapist she worked as a television writer and wrote for a number of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and Time. She is also the author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (2010). Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, published in 2019, was a New York Times bestseller and is widely read in clinical training programs as an unusually honest account of the therapeutic process from both sides.
