REVIEW: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb

We review Lori is a stunningly candid and addictive memoir, talking about her experiences as a therapist and in therapy, including her journey to becoming a therapist, her journey to motherhood and her experience getting over a break-up.

The book is available for purchase everywhere now.

Lori Gottlieb’s memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a stunningly candid memoir, opening the door on therapy both from the therapist and patient’s perspective. Gottlieb places the stories of her clients upon the backdrop of her own story – the book begins when she is left heartbroken when the Boyfriend she is in love with breaks up with her suddenly as he does not want to experience life with children. This is the start of Gottlieb’s ‘presenting problem’ – the issue which makes her begin therapy but is actually the face for deeper embedded issues. Gottlieb is immensely relatable and self aware as she unpacks her own demons and past, in such a way as to hold up a mirror to the reader. 

As she relates her own story, Gottlieb focusses as well on her patients – a ego-centric Hollywood screenwriter who is mad at the world, a woman with terminal cancer navigating a new marriage, a woman in her sixties still grappling with her fractured relationship with her children and a twenty-something-year old stuck in a cycle of alcoholism and abusive relationships. Through the stories, Gottlieb shows us the universality of pain and suffering, but also the hope to be found in every person’s story. Each story reads well – Gottlieb worked on TV and knows how to translate a story, she is immensely compassionate without being unrelatably so (even going into the story of terminating a relationship with one client who she found dull), but the biggest takeaway from the book is the redemptive aspect. In each client, Gottlieb finds something likeable and incredibly human, more than anything the book is incredibly authentic, human and honest.

Purchase the book on Amazon here.