Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

It started with a breakup. Not a dramatic one -- no shouting, no thrown objects, no final confession of betrayal. Just a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, a man named Boyfriend sitting across from Lori Gottlieb at their kitchen table, saying that he loved her but could not see himself raising her young son, Zach. He had known about Zach before they got together. They had been dating for a year and a half. They had talked about the future. And now, on an ordinary Sunday, with the light coming through the window the way it always did, he was ending it.

Gottlieb is a therapist. She had spent years sitting across from patients who were convinced their ex-wives were monsters, their jobs were the problem, their childhoods were to blame for everything, and she had been trained to see the distortions in those narratives -- the places where someone's account of events was shaped more by pain than by accuracy. She was good at it. And yet there she was, reaching for her phone the moment Boyfriend walked out the door, calling her best friend and announcing with complete conviction that this man was a sociopath. A narcissist. An emotional coward.

Her friend listened. And eventually said: "Maybe you should talk to someone."

Gottlieb wrote "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone," published in 2019, as a memoir about what happened next -- what it felt like to lie on the couch as a patient after a career spent sitting in the chair. But the book is not really about her breakup. It is about what happens in the room where people go when their lives have come apart: what therapy actually is, why it works, what it cannot fix, and why the stories we tell about ourselves are almost never the whole story.