This book was not exactly what I was expecting when I read the description. As a fellow psychotherapist, I was hoping to relate more with the author and her story. Therapy is a personal experience and everyone responds in their own way regardless of whether or not they are in the field or not. While I feel that this was rather one-sided, it was a one-sided story of Lori's experience, as a professional in the field. Overall, this was interesting and I enjoyed her perspective and approach. I would recommend this to fellow professionals in our field.

I credit Lori Gottlieb with being the reason I found my happily ever after because of a previous book of hers and this book was another breath of fresh air.

4.5 stars, rounded up.

I grew up seeing my share of therapists, so I know how valuable the relationship can be between therapist and patient. I love seeing Gottlieb find her own therapist and the way it influenced her work. She introduces us to several of her ongoing patients and I felt myself rooting for them as worked through their troubles, made progress, and opened up. She writes with vulnerable honesty and plenty of humor. It feels like an old friend is telling you a story.

One of my favorite parts of this book was the fact that Gottlieb doesn't become a therapist or have kids until she is nearly forty. I love this because it is a reminder that we don't need to have it all figured out by a certain age or period in our lives. It is never too late to start over or try something new.

I really enjoyed this book and found so many quotable passages and little snippets to take back with me. Even if you have no history with therapy I think you will gain some great insight into how we perceive others. We never have to go through anything alone.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone was an interesting take on a therapists life. As someone who may conduct therapy in the future, it was fascinating to see a more in depth reading on what therapy is like over many sessions. This book gave a clearer view on what therapy is really like, new ideas for how to help future clients, and gave examples from clients with diverse problems. It was also interesting to see the in-depth thinking that a therapist goes through as she makes decisions on how to treat clients, but also how she takes care of herself. As healthcare professionals and self-care advocates, we are often not very good at practicing what we preach, and Lori was a clear example of that. We may be our most difficult clients for someone else to help us get through our own struggles. Overall, this book showed a very different view of therapy from what I've been exposed to in my education thus far, and it was fascinating to see therapy from a therapist and clients point of view.

Very interesting by the perspective of the other side of the couch. I'm not one for self help books yet this was insightful on one who asks the questions to finding out what her answers would be - a bit longer than I thought necessary but food for thought. Everyone has baggage to carry and deal with in their lives - even the doctors.

I was highly anticipating this book and let me tell you it lived up to the hype!
I simply loved it. The chapters change between Lori's own patient sessions, her past and how she became a therapist and her own therapy sessions with Wendell.
It's a funny, honest book that makes you think about your own perceptions and behavior and it's so important to talk about therapy openly. All of us go through some tough patches in our lives and sometimes we need a little help or a nudge in the right direction.
I can highly recommend this to anybody.
This book will be in my top of the year 2019 for sure.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an eARC. I want more like this 😄

Some books, beautiful and few, have the power to change us. I read to find the truth and it’s there, present in the pages of literary fiction, memoir- there are souls waiting to be heard and their stories are what connect us all. Their stories help us discover our own.

Lori Gottlieb is a therapist in LA. Her book, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, weaves together the narratives of her patients as well as her own story going to therapy after breaking up with a boyfriend. Within a few pages, I was recommending it to everyone I knew. It was the perfect balance of truth and humor. Social workers I knew needed to read it because they would identify and find humor in Lori’s experiences as a therapist. Non social worker friends needed to read it because it was smart and funny. I quickly included this book, alongside Mary Laura Philpott’s I Miss You When I Blink, in my mental list of the MUST reads for this summer. If you only get to two books, these are the two for you! What I did not expect, was that it would change my life.

Victor Hugo said, “What makes night within us may leave stars.”

I keep a quote jar in my bathroom. I follow the Miracle Morning routine. Every morning, I take out an index card with a handwritten quote and I read it, reflecting as I get ready. As I was reading, I collected fifteen quotes. Falling into this book deeply, collecting quotes, investing myself in the lives of the characters, and ugly crying along with their stories caused me to see aspects of myself represented. My story is not in this book. My story, like all our stories, is unique and an encounter with life that only I have lived. And yet, I discovered things about myself reading it. Sometimes readers see the unwritten, read what they need to read by co-writing the book in the margins of their mind.

"Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way."

I’m grateful for my experience with this book. Grateful for NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read it prior to publication and for Emilie Throckmorton for reminding me about its existence when I didn’t. Although it’s been months since its book birthday, I’m glad I read it and look forward to the beautiful tomorrows.

"We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day."

Lori Gottlieb is a therapist in Los Angeles, a single mom (by choice) to a young boy, and in a long-term relationship with a great guy. Everything seems to be going just as it should until one evening, in what started out as a conversation about weekend plans, Boyfriend drops a bombshell and ends their relationship. After taking some time to try and deal with her grief and anger on her own, a friend suggests she see a therapist herself. At the same time, she is working with her own therapy clients on a variety of issues ranging from work stress to terminal illness. As a therapist, she knows that the surface story presented at first often hides deeper issues, and her own story of a break-up is no exception.

An author's note at the beginning of the book explains that she has been careful to disguise the individuals she writes about, changing details and occasionally creating composite characters, in order "to reveal our shared humanity so that we can see ourselves more clearly. Which is to say, if you see yourself in these pages, it's both coincidental and intentional."

Gottlieb weaves her story of meeting and beginning therapy with "Wendell" in between chapters about working with her own clients, examining the ways they affect her in addition to the ways she tries and hopes to affect them. She writes in a conversational style that makes it easy to imagine her working well with clients while still being a person with her own flaws and strengths. It's a beautiful exploration of the human experience through the lenses of individual lives, illustrating the struggles that we all have beneath what might look like the calm surface of a successful life.

Gottlieb breaks down the walls and stigma about therapy. She walks us through her experience as a therapist concurrent to her experience as a patient in therapy. As you read, you really feel like you're getting to know her, and her as a person AND a therapist. You emphasize with her, you became frustrated with and at her, and you become invested in her story. Must read.

After a tough breakup with her boyfriend, Lori Gottlieb decides to see a therapist. But Gottlieb isn’t your normal patient; she’s also a therapist herself. In this fascinating memoir, Gottlieb gives us a unique glimpse into both sides of the therapy process. She traces about her own unlikely foray into becoming a therapist and then introduces us to a cast of characters (based on real patients of her own) that we come to truly care about as we see their journey through therapy. And she lets us into the room during her own therapy sessions, which are incredibly interesting as well. There are laughs, there is learning, there is the thrill of being a fly-on-the-wall voyeur, and so much more. The book is a must for anyone who has ever been in therapy for anything big or small—or anyone who has ever considered it.

I am reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone now and dipping into it every so often so I can savor the wise nuggets the author drops.

Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who ended up needed a therapist after a heartbreaking breakup (is there any other kind?). She finds a very wise therapist named Wendell and in between writing about her sessions with him, she discusses her clients and their own stories and struggles.

The things she says are insightful, I am actually learning about human nature as I read and I find it so interesting.

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.

This is a long book, my kindle tells me it’s going to take me another four hours to get through and the audible version is over 14 hours! I’m taking it slow and enjoying it as I keep reading.

Read it now!

LOVED this book so much!! Lori is amazing and her story is even more so!! I listened to the audiobook -- I wish she would have done the audio -- but it was still done beautifully!!

Do you go to therapy? Are you interested in learning what a life of a therapist is actually like? Either way, this book is for you. It was hilarious, intriguing and inspiring. A quick read memoir that leaves you understanding a little bit more about the perils of being a therapist.

I absolutely loved this book and cherished every word. Gottlieb is genuine, sincere and very, very human and her experiences on both sides of the therapist's couch are both educational and entertaining. This is the sort of book that makes you google the author in search of everything else she's written. Extremely well-crafted and relatable, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone reads like a novel but touches on some some of the core values that make us human beings. I highly recommend this book - I learned a great deal from reading it, both about therapy and how it works and about myself.

Have you ever wondered about the inner lives of therapists, those folks who spend thousands of hours listening to the issues of other people? This compelling memoir follows Lori Gottlieb, a therapist entrenched in Hollywood. While Gottlieb counsels a diverse range of people, she finds herself in crisis after a failed relationship. She begins sessions with Wendell, an unconventional therapist who often deals with problems in ways that Gottlieb wouldn’t in her own practice.

With Wendell, Gottlieb unravels her role in the ill-fated relationship. We find out more about her life as a single mom, her relationship with her parents, and how she ended up going from Hollywood sets to her current career as a psychotherapist. We also follow the stories of three of her patients: an older woman contemplating suicide, a young woman battling cancer, and a pompous TV writer.

All in all, I found Gottlieb’s journey both interesting and compelling.

Talking about and normalizing therapy has become more important than ever before, and Gottlieb's book is a wonderful entry into the conversation. It was equal parts fascinating and moving to see therapy from two sides: the therapist and the patients. Therapists are put into the lofty position of hearing people's biggest tragedies, anxieties, sadnesses and more and are tasked with helping people change their lives -- but in the end, therapists are people just like the rest of us and sometimes have no idea what they're doing either. To me this book was about human connection, our shared follies and fears and how striving to live our lives to the best of our abilities really connects us all. If the book had been slightly shorter (it felt like there was a lot of repetition to fill pages that just didn't need to be filled) and more tightly edited it might have been even stronger, but overall it's a unque study on talk therapy that will give insight to both those who have benefited from it, and those who know very little about it.

I expected to be drawn in by these stories, both of Gottlieb and her patients, but the length of the book made it feel like they were dragging. Heavier editing could have made a big improvement.

Wow, I don't even know where to begin. This book was absolutely amazing!

I found it very fascinating to learn about Lori's patients, her own therapist "Wendell," as well as other stories from her life. There were too many instances to name that I could relate to in some way. Lori has a way of writing that gets you invested in each patient's life that she mentions in the book. It also makes sense that a therapist might need to have their own therapist to visit from time to time. They have to listen to a variety of issues by people every day. Lori provided us with an insight on what it is like for her to be the patient and how her time in therapy went during the course of a year.

Mental health and therapy (or counseling) is something that some people have a hard time talking about. I wish that people felt more comfortable talking about it.

I highly recommend this book. I have given this book a 5 star review.

#NetGalley Thank you for the e-book download of this book. I wouldn't mind owning a physical copy to refer back to some day.

This will be one of my favorite books of 2019 - I absolutely loved it. I wasn’t sure what to expect and couldn’t remember where I had first heard about it - so went into it a blank slate.

Within the first couple chapters, I was texting a friend that I loved it and thought she might too. Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and in this book she takes us into the journey of some of her patients as well as her experiences with her own therapist.

It’s well written, funny and occasionally heartbreaking. Much like the experience of therapy - sometimes it pushed me to think about things that weren’t easy and sometimes I got very emotional. For me - this wasn’t a book to rush - I took my time with it.

I highlighted so many parts and wanted to text them to everyone. If you’ve talked to me during the time I was reading this, I probably managed to work it into our conversation.

It’s really hard for me to put into words what I loved about this book but I encourage you to try it and I will leave you with a quote from the book where Gottlieb describes how it went when she started writing this book:

“All week, I wrote about my breakup, my therapist, my mortality, our fear of taking responsibility for our lives and the need to do so in order to heal. I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely. I wrote about taking risks and letting go and how hard it is to walk around those prison bars even when freedom isn’t just right in front of us but literally inside of us, in our minds.”

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for my early copy in exchange for my honest review. I will be buying a copy for my shelf as well. I wholeheartedly recommend this book!!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

i love stories like this. i love hearing about their cases and lives.

this was a comical book.