Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (2019) is a nonfiction book by American writer and psychotherapist, Lori Gottlieb. A combination of memoir and popular science, it brings together Gottlieb’s personal life experience and her therapeutic work to illuminate the role therapy can play in everyone’s lives. The work has become a New York Times bestseller and Time magazine Must-Read Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Goodreads Choice Awards in the Nonfiction category, and O, The Oprah Magazine has voted it Nonfiction book of the year. The guide refers to the e-book of the first American edition, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2019. (The pagination referenced in the guide was obtained via the free Calibre e-book reader.)

Plot Summary

Lori’s story begins with the sudden breakup of her long-term relationship with Boyfriend, who decides he would rather not share his life with a mom of an eight-year-old. Reeling from this betrayal, Lori decides to start seeing a therapist, and her colleague recommends Wendell Bronson, an experienced but unorthodox therapist, who often challenges Lori’s beliefs and biases.

While examining her own progress through therapy sessions with Wendell, Lori relates the life stories of several of her patients. John is a 40-year-old TV writer whose work obsession has led to a crisis in his marriage to Margo. During his therapy, he reveals that he lost his mother when he was six years old, and that his son, Gabe, died in a car accident for which he blames himself, despite evidence to the contrary. Lori manages to break through his strong defense mechanisms through a combination of support and provocation, to discover a man paralyzed by sadness who can’t enjoy his family. By the end of his therapy, John manages to verbalize his feelings to Margo, who is incidentally seeing Lori’s own therapist, Wendell, and therapy sessions help them both appreciate the other’s point of view and find a common language.

Rita is about to turn 70, and she suffers from depression, feeling she has lived her whole life without purpose. A victim of spousal abuse, she has ignored her four children’s suffering at the hand of their father and now they refuse any contact with her. Rita is a talented artist, and during therapy, she starts expressing herself through painting and pottery, while also managing to commence a romantic relationship with her new neighbor, Myron, after a prolonged period of avoidance and self-sabotage. Lori helps her find meaning in her life and relieve some of the burden of accumulated guilt by focusing on what life still has to offer.

Julie is a young newlywed, suffering from terminal cancer. Lori helps her navigate the moments of hope and despair, while Julie is coming to terms with imminent death and everything she has projected for the future that she will never achieve. Lori shares Julie’s grief as her therapist and friend by the time Julie dies, having helped her plan her “funeral party” and write her own obituary.

Charlotte is a 20-year-old who suffers from alcoholism and leads a problematic love and sexual life, attaching romantic feelings to unsuitable and destructive men, which in turn exacerbates her alcohol abuse. Lori guides her though many false starts and helps her deal with disappointments after Charlotte repeats her destructive patterns. By the end of therapy, Charlotte is ready to enter an addiction treatment program, while striving to gain a better understanding of the self-damaging processes inside of her that drive her to questionable partners.

All the while, Wendell guides Lori to an understanding of her own sadness about the breakup and the loss of a projected future with Boyfriend and her inability to finish writing a book on happiness that she is contractually obligated to deliver, as well as her deeper fears of dying and of not being useful and productive. Lori’s own therapy sessions inform her work with her patients and make her a more empathetic figure. By the end of the book, Lori understands that concluding the therapeutic process is not an ending but only a pause in the greater scheme of things and that therapy is always there as an option to help people cope with the demands of life.