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A review by breanneporter
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
emotional
funny
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
4.5
I loved this book and basically sobbed my way through the entire last third. What a cool concept - Lori Gottlieb draws from her own personal and professional experiences as both a therapist and a patient to give readers an inside look into what a therapy process can look like from both sides of the couch. She discusses the personal situations that drove her to seek therapy and allows us to follow the journeys of several compelling patients from their first sessions with her through their moments of breakthrough/revelation. All of the characters felt supremely real and complicated and it felt to me like such a beautiful gift to read these stories and glimpse these lives and these emotions and motivations. This book is very emotional - I’m not kidding that I bawled my eyes out - but it’s also so thought provoking and reflective and insightful.
Lori has a distinctive writing voice and a way of ending every chapter with a lesson or a cliffhanger that took some getting used to, for me, but overall I liked the short digestible chapters and how the story flowed and how she slowly revealed more to the reader, never rushing for us understand faster than we needed to. I struggled a bit to finish around the middle, which knocked it down a bit from a 5, but I wonder if I had read it via audio (instead of digital) if it would have been a 5. Either way, I don’t think everyone would enjoy this but I would recommend to anyone interested in the human condition, in therapy, in a unique kind of memoir, in a book that makes them reflect on themselves and their pasts and their attitudes toward living. Thank you Lori, for ditching that last contract so you could write this instead!
Lori has a distinctive writing voice and a way of ending every chapter with a lesson or a cliffhanger that took some getting used to, for me, but overall I liked the short digestible chapters and how the story flowed and how she slowly revealed more to the reader, never rushing for us understand faster than we needed to. I struggled a bit to finish around the middle, which knocked it down a bit from a 5, but I wonder if I had read it via audio (instead of digital) if it would have been a 5. Either way, I don’t think everyone would enjoy this but I would recommend to anyone interested in the human condition, in therapy, in a unique kind of memoir, in a book that makes them reflect on themselves and their pasts and their attitudes toward living. Thank you Lori, for ditching that last contract so you could write this instead!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Death, Cancer, and Child death