Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Gottlieb, a practicing psychotherapist, structures her memoir around a startling reversal: after a sudden breakup sends her into crisis, she becomes a patient herself, seeing a therapist named Wendell while continuing to treat her own patients. The book braids together her sessions with four recurring patients — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with terminal cancer, a retiree threatening suicide, and a twenty-something drifting through life — with her own unraveling and slow reconstruction on Wendell's couch.

Why it matters: by putting the therapist in the patient's chair, Gottlieb dismantles the myth that therapists have their emotional lives figured out, and shows that insight rarely arrives as a single breakthrough — it arrives through the same messy, repetitive, often frustrating process for everyone, professional included. Her core argument is that most people's suffering stems from stories they've told themselves so long they've mistaken them for facts, and that therapy's real work is learning to tell a truer, more flexible story about your own life.

Who should read it

Anyone curious about what actually happens inside a therapy room — from either side of the couch — will find this unusually candid and specific. It's especially resonant for people facing their own life-disrupting crisis, or anyone who assumes needing help is a sign that something has gone uniquely wrong with them.

About the author

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where she writes the "Dear Therapist" advice column; she trained as a journalist before becoming a therapist.