Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
CBC Books | | Posted: December 17, 2019 6:10 PM | Last Updated: December 18, 2019
Lori Gottlieb
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. (From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
From the book
So," I'm telling Wendell, "we get back from a late dinner with friends and I ask Zach (my son) to take his shower, but he wants to play, and I tell him we can't because it's a school night. And then he has this complete overreaction and whines, 'You're so mean! You're the meanest!'— which isn't like him at all— but also this anger just boils up inside me.
"So I say something petty like, 'Oh, really? Well, maybe next time I shouldn't take you and your friends out to dinner if I'm so mean.' Like I'm five years old! And he says, 'Fine!' and slams his door— he's never slammed his door before— and gets in the shower and I go to my computer planning to answer emails but instead I'm having a conversation in my head about whether I really am mean. How could I have responded that way? I'm the adult, after all.
"And then all of a sudden I remember a frustrating phone conversation I'd had with my mother that morning and it clicks. I'm not angry with Zach. I'm angry with my mom. It was classic displacement."
From Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb ©2019. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.