Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb is an American therapist and writer whose Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a candid, warm dual memoir about what it means to seek — and provide — therapy.

Lori Gottlieb trained as a therapist after earlier careers in television and medicine, and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, published in 2019, draws on both her clinical practice and her own unexpected experience of entering therapy after a devastating breakup. The book weaves between her sessions with four patients — anonymized and composite, she notes — and her own sessions with a therapist she resisted seeing. The result is something rare: a book that explains how psychotherapy actually works, from the inside of both chairs.

The book’s greatest strength is its honesty. Gottlieb doesn’t protect herself from scrutiny or cast herself simply as the wise, healing therapist. She shows her own denial, her resistance, and her slow recognition of patterns she had been avoiding in herself with the same attention she brings to her patients’ defenses. The patients — a self-important Hollywood producer, a young woman with a terminal diagnosis, an unhappily married woman in her thirties, an elderly woman planning to end her life — are rendered with enough complexity that they become genuinely moving rather than illustrative.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone has been criticized in some clinical circles for blurring the lines between memoir and patient portraiture, even with consent and anonymization. A few sequences feel shaped for emotional effect in ways that therapists might find professionally uncomfortable. But for general readers — and particularly for those who are ambivalent about whether therapy could help them — the book is unusually persuasive: not as an advertisement for therapy, but as an honest account of what it actually demands and offers.