This post may contain affiliate links. For more info on this, visit my disclosure page. Thank you for your support in this way!
Maybe You Should Talk To Someone’s Back-of-Book Description
From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world–where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
My Thoughts on Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
As I write this, the world is battling CoVid-19. My state has closed most public spaces, thousands of people around the country are on lockdown or quarantine…it’s surreal. These are very strange times to be living in, but thankfully that’s what we’re still doing – living. Some of us are finding a lot of time on our hands, some of us are experiencing a lot of stress and difficult emotions… a lot of us have both. As the title of this post suggests, I do hope you are all talking to someone – friends, family, or a professional – about how you’re feeling. Don’t bottle it in.
I finished this book about three weeks ago but didn’t have the time or energy to write – constant news-checking consumed me. But I know that books are a wonderful escape right now, and this one especially could be really helpful for some people.
It probably seems like a very long time ago now, but it’s likely you’ve seen this book title in some social media posts or in articles; I know I did. But long before that, it was a Book of The Month option and I decided to snatch it up, even though months would pass before I felt ready to read it.
As you can see from the description above, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed is a book about therapy. But it’s really so much more than that! It’s about people – our good sides, bad sides, and everything in between. Our emotions and behaviors, our love and loss. It’s about finding ways to move past things and embrace life while getting to know ourselves and understand others on a deeper level.
This is a non-fiction memoir but it reads like a novel. It’s told from the perspective of a therapist and includes everything she’s going through personally, as well as some of the things her patients go through.
All characters have been fictionalized in order to protect people’s privacy, but they are all so very real. Every bit of dialogue and how those interactions are written is so smooth and relatable. The author, Lori Gottlieb, gives us enough information about the patients that you begin to really wonder about them and hope for positive outcomes. And she shares enough personal information about herself that you feel as though you can really relate to her.
Woven throughout these patient-therapist interactions is an abundance of information about the human psyche and theories or viewpoints from other psychologists. Maybe I just have a deep fascination with psychology, but I found this incredibly useful and enjoyable to read.
Because of this, I could have breezed through this book in record time. But I read it slowly on purpose; I would make myself put it down so I could really think about and appreciate what I had read.
If you’ve seen my reviews before, you know my thing is to share my favorite quotes from the book. I do this by making little marks and dog-earing the pages (I know, I’m a monster!). Well, my copy of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone could easily have been a continuous string of marks and folded pages! I loved every bit of it.
Nuy it Now!
Favorite Quotes From Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
“The things we protest the most are often the very things we need to look at.”
“We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.”
“So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.”
“Almost every woman I see apologizes for her feelings, especially her tears…Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.”
“People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their mood had been drawn down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives?”
“…pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again.”
“As people age they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they’re reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.”
“I was tired but in an energized way, ready for rest after having been awakened.”
“Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally) – all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you will relate to yourself and others.”
In Conclusion
5 STARS. Literally. There’s nothing I didn’t like about this book and it was terrific timing on my part to decide to read it. In my personal life I have always considered seeing a therapist – I believe in the power of talking to someone and getting help with issues when necessary. But I never had…until I read this book. It felt like the right time, and I had the right motivation I suppose, so I finally called and made an appointment.
Don’t get me wrong – Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is not an advertisement for therapy. The author does not in any way tell people that they should all go talk to someone. But it does subtly express the beauty of it, should you decide you want to.
I know we all have a lot going on in our lives right now – there’s a lot happening in the world. My hope is that maybe this book can offer some help or relief to people having a hard time with all the emotions they’re confronted with. If nothing else, it’ll be a good distraction to the news.
Thank you so much for checking out this review. Feel free to share it with other book lovers, or friends who you think would benefit. And don’t forget to save your favorite quotes below!
This post was proofread by Grammarly
