Lori Gottlieb is a woman of many talents. She has been, at various points in her life, a journalist, a single mother, a TV executive (she was there when Jennifer Aniston auditioned for Friends), a graduate of Stanford Medical School and a psychotherapist. But in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, she chooses to introduce herself mid-session with her most annoying patient, John, “an asshole with spectacular teeth”. Stifling yawns, sighs, tears and frustrated interjections (“Have compassion,” she reminds herself) as he complains, Gottlieb struggles to keep it together. Not least because she’s just been dumped, only allowing herself to cry in the short breaks between sessions.
Unlike many books about therapy, this is an accessible, informal and very personal story – a chatty memoir that also contains the theoretical insights that underpin much of psychotherapy. “While the image of me with mascara running down my tear-streaked face between sessions may be uncomfortable to contemplate,” she writes, “that’s where this story about the handful of struggling humans you are about to meet begins – with my own humanity.”
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