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Lori Gottlieb's cheeky title, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, produced the
anticipatory alarm that the book that might best fit the self-help genre. The more I became immersed in this 400-plus-page book, though, the more I came to appreciate Gottlieb's determination to craft a work that celebrates long-term psychotherapy without unduly simplifying psychoanalytic constructs and values. No one can fail to be impressed that the book has sold over a million copies since its publication in 2019 (when it appeared on several best-book-of-the-year lists). Since then an accompanying workbook has been published, in 2021, and a TV series is being planned. The book's success, I suspect, is due to its sensitive treatment of the roles of both patient and therapist and its candor in revealing how they impact each other to foster change in the life of the patient.
Gottlieb presents four cases in detail from her private practice, interspersed with her own story, with special attention to her experience in therapy, prompted by a relationship's coming to a disappointing end. Her personal journey is convoluted: we do not learn much about her early life, though we are told she has a close relationship with her father and a conflicted one with her mother.
The story picks up as she describes her first career in Hollywood after graduating from Stanford, how she shifted direction by going to medical school, and then pivoted again to take an unspecified degree in psychology (her Wikipedia page says she has an M.A, from Pepperdine and is licensed in marriage and family therapy). At the center of her story is her own ongoing therapy, which got under way when she reluctantly arranged to meet “Wendell,” having sought a referral from a colleague, allegedly for someone else. Gottlieb mentions that she had been in therapy before, and I would have been curious to hear about that in greater detail. Still, Gottlieb validates a fundamental part of