Editors Reads Verdict
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is one of the most compelling books about psychotherapy ever written for a general audience — Gottlieb's decision to be a patient herself gives her writing an unusual emotional honesty, and the parallel stories of her four clients are rendered with a novelistic warmth that makes the therapy room feel fully inhabited rather than illustrative.
What We Loved
- The dual perspective — therapist and patient simultaneously — gives the book an honesty rare in clinical memoir
- The four client stories are compelling on their own terms, not just as case studies
- Gottlieb writes with genuine literary skill, and the book reads as engagingly as good fiction
- The book demystifies therapy without reducing it, making it more accessible to readers who might resist it
Minor Drawbacks
- Some readers may find the pacing slow in the middle sections
- The therapist-as-hero framing occasionally veers toward self-congratulation
- The level of detail about clients, even fictionalized, will raise questions for some readers about therapeutic ethics
Key Takeaways
- → Therapists need therapy too — and being a patient makes you a better clinician
- → The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are both protective and limiting, and therapy is largely about revising them
- → Change is genuinely possible, even when it seems impossible, but it requires honesty and willingness to be uncomfortable
- → The therapeutic relationship itself — not any particular technique — is the primary vehicle of change
- → Most people come to therapy seeking one thing and discover they needed something quite different
| Author | Lori Gottlieb |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Pages | 432 |
| Published | April 2, 2019 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir, Psychology, Nonfiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Anyone curious about how therapy actually works, considering starting therapy, or drawn to memoir that explores psychological depth and the complexity of human change. |
When the Therapist Needs a Therapist
Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. When her long-term partner suddenly breaks off their relationship with what she considers an inadequate explanation, she does what she advises her clients to do: she goes to therapy. What she doesn’t expect is how profoundly difficult she will find it — how resistant she will be to the same insights she offers others, how much her professional training will serve as armor against actual self-knowledge.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone interweaves two storylines: Gottlieb in therapy with a therapist she comes to respect and then resent and then respect again, and Gottlieb treating four clients whose problems, she gradually realizes, reflect something in her own. The structural elegance of this arrangement is matched by the execution — this is a genuinely well-written book, not just an informative one.
Four Patients, One Therapist, One Patient-Therapist
The four clients are a study in the range of what brings people to therapy. There’s John, a narcissistic Hollywood producer who seems to have no insight whatsoever. There’s Julie, a newlywed in her thirties with a terminal cancer diagnosis. There’s Charlotte, a young woman who has made a spectacular mess of her twenties and can’t understand why. And there’s Wendell — not a client but Gottlieb’s own therapist, rendered with particular care.
Each client story is compelling in its own right. Gottlieb is a skilled enough writer to make them feel like characters in a novel rather than case studies. And she is disciplined enough to let their stories evolve unpredictably rather than moving them toward predetermined insights on a therapist’s schedule.
What Therapy Actually Is
One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its demystification of the therapeutic process. Gottlieb explains, through showing rather than telling, what makes therapy work — the relationship, the willingness to sit with discomfort, the gradual revision of the stories we tell about ourselves, the moment when insight stops being intellectual and becomes something you actually feel in your body.
She is also honest about what doesn’t work, about impasses and mistakes and the sessions where nothing useful happens. This honesty makes the book unusually trustworthy for readers who may be skeptical of therapy or uncertain whether it could help them.
A Book That Does What Therapy Does
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone has been read by people who never thought they’d be interested in a book about psychotherapy, and they’ve recommended it to everyone they know. That’s because it’s fundamentally a book about the human condition — about the stories we trap ourselves in, the losses we can’t process, and the surprising ways that becoming honest about those things can change the direction of a life.
Our rating: 4.6/5 — One of the most humane, honest, and beautifully written books about therapy and the interior life, essential reading whether or not you’ve ever sat in a therapist’s chair.
Ready to Read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: