Talks & Entertainment

Every year, nearly 30 million Americans sit on a therapist’s couch—and some of these patients are therapists. In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb—a psychotherapist and the “Dear Therapist” columnist for The Atlantic—takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

One day, 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, her new quirky but seasoned therapist.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives—from a self-absorbed Hollywood producer to a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys (even one from the waiting room)—she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

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, hope and change. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone reveals what it means to be human and the power we have to transform or lives.

Gottlieb is the bestselling author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In conversation with Scott Simon, a Peabody Award-winning correspondent and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Book signing to follow.