1Q1A Lori Gottlieb Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

The Avid Reader Show

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, published in April by Norton. Lori is a psychotherapist who writes the Dear Therapist advise column for The Atlantic. She also writes for the NYTM, and has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN and NPR.
Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is optioned for a TV series and it is perfectly structured for one.
The book, which is a memoir of sorts, deals with a therapist, Lori, whose own life, in a flash becomes a crisis of sorts. So while tending to the needs of her various patients, she is also at sea about her own life and thus seeks out the therapeutic advice of a therapist of her own.
Throughout these pages, we meet and become confidants of many of those folks that come to see her each week.
John, Julie, Charlotte, Rita, Lori herself and her therapist Wendell.
We also come across some other finely drawn characters and friends. Her professional suite mates, her professional consultation group, her best friend, her son, her parents and Cory, her stylist (my favorite character).
The idea behind some of this is that therapy cannot only change the life of the patients, it can also trigger thoughts and questions in the mind of the therapist herself.
Lori has the courage in this book to expose herself, her problems, how she deals with them, sometimes in not the most positive ways and her journey to understand and to process the issues that lie beneath the surface of what seems to be the need for a simple psychological tune-up.