Lori Gottlieb, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE

Insightful, compassionate, and engagingly written, this is a memoir of a woman who is both in therapy for herself and providing therapy to her patients in Los Angeles. For me, the book recalled the years I spent in therapy in New York, when I was in graduate school in my early thirties, with so much to learn about my own misbegotten assumptions and poor communication and coping skills. Much of this material felt familiar--the role of the therapist, the process of corrective experiences that help us to question our assumptions, discovering the space after an "event" and before a "response" in which choices are made, and identifying the ways we sublimate, repress and misdirect our feelings. But despite having seen much of this up close for myself, I enjoyed spending two days (it's a quick read, with short, economically written chapters) in this woman's mind.