We are very lucky to have our Author of the Month Book Club Giveaway for this NYT Bestseller and current Top Club Pick, but also to have author Lori Gottlieb join us for a Virtual Book Party! So enter to win the book for your book club, then R.S.V.P. to the virtual book party. Details below.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!Now being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria and ABC!*An O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2019* *A People Magazine Book of the Week*
*An Apple Best Books Pick for April*
*An April IndieNext Pick*
*A Book of the Month Club Selection*
*A Publishers Marketplace Buzz Book*
*A Newsday, Apple iBooks, Thrive Global, Refinery29,
and Book Riot Most Anticipated Book of 2019*
“An irresistibly addictive tour of the human condition.”–Kirkus, starred review
“Rarely have I read a book that challenged me to see myself in an entirely new light, and was at the same time laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absorbing.”–Katie Couric
“This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book.”–Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post and Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
“Wise, warm, smart, and funny. You must read this book.”–Susan Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Quiet
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. 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.
Author Q&A
Lori Gottlieb
by M.J. Rose
Q: As someone who has been in therapy more than once , and who always wanted to get inside my therapist’s mind, my first question is — what made you decide to write a memoir about your life and career?
A: This wasn’t originally the book that I was supposed to write. In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone I talk about how I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness, and how I couldn’t get myself to write that book because I felt like what I was writing about didn’t reflect all the nuances of the human condition that I was seeing in the therapy room as a relatively new therapist at the time. So what I wanted to do was bring people into the therapy room so that they could see what I have the privilege of seeing every day. I decided to follow four seemingly very different patients as they go through their struggles, and then I added a fifth patient, and the fifth patient is me, as I go through my own struggle and go to a therapist myself. It’s a book not so much about the five of us, but really about the reader. We can see ourselves more clearly through the lens of other people’s stories. Readers have said that no matter how different the patients seem from them at the very beginning, they found themselves in every single person by the end.
Q: Your book is at times so funny and then deeply emotional always honest. Was it a difficult story to tell? Did you find yourself holding a lot back? Especially when it came to you talking about your own therapist.
Originally I thought I would just bring people into the therapy room and follow my patients, but as I say at the beginning of the book, my most significant credential is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race, and I didn’t want to position myself as the expert up on high. wanted to show that we’re all more the same than we are different, and as my patients hold up a mirror to me and I am forced to ask myself the same questions about love and loss and hope and transformation that they are asking themselves.
Q: I can’t help but ask you to tell us about the book being made into a TV series with Eva Longoria. What has that experience been like?
I’m really excited about the TV show with Eva Longoria. What’s really important to me about the show is that there are two tropes of therapists in the media: there’s the brick wall—the therapist who doesn’t say anything, and there’s the train wreck, the hot mess, the therapist whose life is in shambles outside the therapy room, but who’s an effective therapist inside the room. And neither of those tropes reflect the therapists that I know. So I’m so excited for there to be a show about people who happen to be therapists as opposed to a show about therapists—I think that distinction matters. I’m really glad we’re bringing this to series because I think it—like the book—will help people see what therapy is and what it isn’t, and that it can really help people to grow and make huge changes in their lives. I hope that the series brings that message to even more people.
Q: Thinking of all the bookclub readers who are reading this interview, would you put together your ideal bookclub– made up of authors –who you would pick to meet with to discuss your book. And what would you expect them to ask you?
I would pick my favorite novelists because the reason the reason a really good novel resonates so much is because the author was able to elucidate some deep, universal psychological truths that are sometimes hard to articulate, or that we don’t even notice in our own lives until they’re there on the page and we say “oh wait, that’s me,” or “that’s someone I know.” Whenever we have that “oh I recognize myself” moment, those are the writers that really capture the imagination. A lot of people have said that Maybe You Should Talk to Someone actually reads like a novel, and I think that’s because the nature of life is about story. We make sense of our lives through story. So I would ask my favorite novelists, namely Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, to talk with me about the characters and the real patients in the book.
Pick Up Your Zoom Background:
Right click on the images below to save them and then use as virtual backgrounds: