Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb (2019) 415 pages

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb writes about her own life and career trajectory, as well as about her patients and her own time in therapy. She gives the reader a peak behind the curtain, showing what brought her to look for a therapist for herself and also what brings her patients to her. The storylines of several patients, as well as that of the therapist herself, are compellingly woven with just the right amounts of compassion and humor.

We see how the patient-therapist relationship evolves over time, and how even some of the most difficult patients, given time and space and a good therapist, can begin to heal. 

Monkey Mind: a Memoir of Anxiety / Daniel Smith 212 p.

A pleasantly written book that was neither insightful nor comical enough to be memorable.  Smith, after most of a lifetime of sometimes crippling anxiety, feels mostly OK these days.  Which is nice, definitely, except that I couldn't relate to much of it.  Smith traces the beginning of his problems to a bizarre teenage sexual episode.  It's a memoir, so of course it's self-referential, but it felt like Smith was talking to himself rather than the reader.