Where to Start with Lori Gottlieb: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Lori Gottlieb — how to approach Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, her memoir about being simultaneously a therapist and a patient. A complete reading guide.
By Lena Fischer
Lori Gottlieb is an American psychotherapist, author, and Atlantic contributor known for her frank writing about relationships, mental health, and the human capacity for self-deception. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019) was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and became a major bestseller — unusual for a book centred on psychotherapy — because it was written with enough narrative skill and emotional honesty to reach readers who would never pick up a clinical manual.
Where to Start: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019)
The essential Lori Gottlieb — and one of the most compelling accounts of psychotherapy available to a general reader. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone was written from an unusual position: Gottlieb is a therapist who, after her long-term partner abruptly ended their relationship with an explanation she couldn’t accept, found herself unable to process the loss despite years of professional training in exactly how to process such things. She did what she tells her clients to do. She went to therapy. And she discovered that being a therapist does not immunize you against the hard work of being a patient.
The book interweaves two storylines with structural care. In one, Gottlieb is a patient — sitting across from a therapist named Wendell, resistant and defensive in ways that would be familiar to her professionally, discovering that the intellectual understanding of therapeutic principles is very different from the emotional experience of actually applying them to yourself. In the other, she is a therapist treating four clients simultaneously, whose problems and resistances increasingly illuminate her own.
The four clients are rendered as characters rather than case studies:
John is a successful Hollywood producer who sees himself as the only intelligent person in any room and believes his problems are entirely the fault of other people’s stupidity. His arc — the gradual, reluctant discovery that his certainty about himself might be protecting something fragile — is the book’s most comedic strand and ultimately its most moving.
Julie is a thirty-something newlywed with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The question her therapy raises — how do you live, meaningfully, in the time you have left? — gives the book some of its most profound pages.
Charlotte is a young woman who has made a spectacular mess of her twenties and comes to therapy wanting to understand why she cannot stop self-sabotaging. Her relationship with her parents, and the stories she inherited from them about who she is, forms the core of her work.
Rita is in her late sixties and has been telling Gottlieb, for weeks, that she plans to end her life at seventy. The ethical and emotional dimensions of this case are the book’s most complex, and Gottlieb handles them with appropriate gravity.
The book’s most valuable contribution is its demystification of the therapeutic process — not by explaining it clinically but by showing it through accumulated scenes. What makes therapy work (when it does) is not any particular technique but the relationship: two people in a room, one committed to helping the other see themselves more clearly, over enough time that the defenses gradually soften. Gottlieb shows this working, and also shows it failing, and is honest about the difference.
Her parallel experience as a patient gives her unusual authority to describe what it feels like from the inside — the resistance, the moments of sudden recognition, the sessions where nothing moves, the rare moments when something shifts in a way that cannot be manufactured on a schedule.
Reading Lori Gottlieb
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is Gottlieb’s essential book. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full Lori Gottlieb bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Lori Gottlieb author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Lori Gottlieb?
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019) is Gottlieb's essential book — one of the most compelling accounts of psychotherapy ever written for a general audience. A therapist going to therapy herself after a painful breakup interweaves her own journey as a patient with the stories of four clients she is treating simultaneously. The dual perspective gives the book an emotional honesty rare in clinical memoir, and it reads with the warmth and narrative pull of good fiction.
What is Maybe You Should Talk to Someone about?
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone follows two parallel storylines: Gottlieb in therapy with a therapist named Wendell, working through a sudden breakup she cannot process despite her professional training; and Gottlieb treating four clients simultaneously — a narcissistic Hollywood producer, a young woman with a terminal cancer diagnosis, a chaotic twenty-something, and an older woman stuck in a decades-long unhappy marriage. The book uses these intersecting stories to illuminate how therapy actually works and why it so often doesn't go where anyone expects.
Do you need professional knowledge to read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone?
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone requires no professional background. Gottlieb explains therapeutic concepts — the therapeutic alliance, transference, resistance, the way stories we tell about ourselves become prisons — through concrete stories rather than clinical explanation. The book is specifically written to make therapy accessible and comprehensible to general readers, including those who are skeptical of it or uncertain whether it could help them.
What should I read after Maybe You Should Talk to Someone?
After Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner covers a therapist's case studies with comparable literary skill and deeper existential philosophy — the classic of the genre. Susan David's Emotional Agility covers the psychological principles behind the stuck narratives that Gottlieb's clients are working to revise. For those drawn to the memoir dimension, Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am is a different kind of survival memoir with comparable emotional power.
