Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb, 2019)

A therapist memoir where we get to follow the therapist as practitioner, but also as a client in therapy herself – which is an unusual setup for this kind of book. The subtitle is “a therapist, her therapist and our lives revealed”. It seems to me that the book does a pretty good job of conveying the ins and outs of being a therapist. We also get a lot of backstory on Gottlieb’s career before becoming a therapist, which she seems to want to integrate in the story. She started in TV production, working on shows like E.R, then went to medical school, dropped out, started working in journalism. It was when she had some regrets about having dropped out of med school that someone suggested she might consider becoming a therapist. I know this because she tells the story in the book. She also tells the story of a few of her patients, and unlike other books of this kind, she includes precious vignettes that bring up various embarrassing or awkward moments that come with the job of a therapist. What happens when you bump into a client unexpectedly at the store? And what are the downsides of using Google to learn about your therapist’s private life? Interwoven is also the story of how she got pregnant, and the devastating breakup that leads her to seek out her own therapist. She tells us about her weekly collegial meetings where they discuss difficult current cases, and use insider slang about video sessions.
It is all very well crafted and it shows that Gottlieb is a writer, because even though some scenes come across as a bit unbelievable, she does a good job putting it all together; story, suspense, a bit of educative content about therapy all tied together with a human interest angle. Sometimes it’s a bit heavy on the fluff, but, hey, I guess that’s because it’s aiming for a large audience. It is very readable, and the chapters are just right in length for it to feel like you should read just one more.
All in all, a triumph of a book, which probably does a lot for spreading the gospel on the benefits of therapy. As a therapist, I found it pretty funny.