Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

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Lori Gottlieb

#9587  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.

PRAISE FROM READERS:

“Some people are great writers, and other people are great therapists. Lori Gottlieb is, astoundingly, both. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is about the wonder of being human: how none of us is immune from struggle, and how we can grow into ourselves and escape our emotional prisons. 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 

“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. Lori Gottlieb takes us inside the most intimate of encounters as both clinician and patient and leaves us with a surprisingly fresh understanding of ourselves, one another, and the human condition. Her willingness to expose her own blind spots along with her patients’ shows us firsthand that we aren’t alone in our struggles and that maybe we should talk more about them! 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

Copyright 2019, 432 pages. $28.00. SPECIALS: 10 copies for $254.95; 100 copies for $2,395.00.