May Book Club -

'Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed'

For our May meeting, we have a chosen an instant best-selling work of nonfiction: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb.

"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. 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: about desire and need, guilt and redemption, meaning and mortality, loneliness and love.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, pulling back the curtain on the therapeutic process and offering the rarest of gifts: an entertaining, illuminating, and quite possibly life-changing account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them." (Good Reads)

According to Alex Kuczynski, New York Times, April 16, 2019:

"Gottlieb knows her plot twists. Before she trained as a therapist, she worked as a writer for TV shows like “ER.” She’s also the author of the Dear Therapist column in The Atlantic magazine. “I’ve always been drawn to stories,” she confesses, “not just what happens but how the story is told.” In showing us how patients reveal just a part of their selves, she gives us a dizzily satisfying collage of narratives, a kind of ensemble soap opera set in the already soap operatic world of Los Angeles. (The book is now being developed as a series with Eva Longoria for ABC.)"

Make you want to read more?

We hope you will join us for the discussion of this book, which People Magazine describes as "part Oliver Sachs and part Nora Ephron".