What Does It Mean to Be Human? Lori Gottlieb on the Life of a Therapist

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Lori Gottlieb joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her latest book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

From the episode:

Roxanne Coady: How did the structure of the book contribute to what you hoped the book would achieve?

Lori Gottlieb: I really wanted to bring people into my world as a therapist so they could see what I see. Therapists have this unique vantage point. Most people don’t get to hear the kind of things we hear on a daily basis, even though we are all experiencing these kinds of things. I wanted to bring people [in], and one way to do that was to show what it is like to sit with one of my patients, and to watch particularly these four patients that I write about in the book go through their experiences.

I was also going through an upheaval in my own life at the same time, and I felt that it would be almost disingenuous not to show me as a human being too. So I become the fifth patient, and you see me go through therapy with my own therapist. It was really important to show me as the person going through the human struggles. I say at the beginning of the book that my greatest credential is that I am a card-carrying member of the human race. I also wanted to show the other side, and other people going through their struggles—that normalizes what I call the daily problems of living for all of us.

Roxanne: How did you go about picking the patients? Obviously, their names and situations are changed. Maybe even some of them are an amalgam, but how did you decide which patients to make part of the book?

Lori: I wanted to choose very different people. The people I chose look very different on the surface from one another and even from me in terms of age, gender, personality, history, or the presenting problem they came in with. Underneath it all, all five of us are dealing with the same existential themes about life. I thought it was interesting to present people who seem very different but who actually are quite similar.

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Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series with Eva Longoria. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic‘s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times. She is on the Advisory Council for Bring Change to Mind and has appeared in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.