Episode-by-episode discussion of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb — a therapist, her therapist, and the stories we keep telling ourselves. Each episode takes one chapter and turns it into something you can use today. Part of The Burnout Podcasts.
One chapter per episode, in the book's own order. Each episode stands on its own.
A Hollywood writer named John sits down, announces that he is surrounded by idiots, and spends the hour proving it. He cannot sleep, he cannot get along with his wife, and he is certain the problem is everyone else. What he does not know is that his therapist has spent the night crying over a man who ended things out of nowhere, and is sitting across from him thinking, I hear you, brother. This is the opening move of a memoir about a therapist who is about to become somebody's patient. 📖
They had been together two years, the wedding was effectively assumed, and then over dinner he said he could not do ten more years of living with a kid. Not her kid specifically. Any kid. Lori's jaw takes a full minute to work again. What follows is the clean, horrible anatomy of a breakup that arrives with no warning — the sentence, the silence, the slow understanding that the whole future just got deleted. The chapter title is her mother's old line about pointless what-ifs, and it is exactly right. 📖
Tell someone you are a psychotherapist and you get a pause and then the same questions: are you analysing me right now, can you read my mind. The answer is funnier and stranger than people expect. Meanwhile Lori is on the phone to her friend Allison, sobbing like a sixteen-year-old and appalled at herself for it at forty-something. Then the green light by the door flicks on. Her first patient of the day is here. One foot, then the other. She is going to be fine. She is not fine. 📖
Before she was a therapist Lori was a twenty-something assistant in television, doing long hours and mind-numbing work for no overtime, and loving one thing about it — stories. Not just what happens to people, but how they tell it. This is the chapter that explains where her ear comes from, and it ends on a line she will spend most of the book earning: it seemed like the perfect solution to her boredom, and it would take her years to realise she had solved entirely the wrong problem. 📖
We discuss it chapter by chapter, but nothing replaces reading it. This is an Amazon affiliate link — it costs you nothing extra and it helps pay for the show.
4 episodes in this show, 1,100+ across the whole network, and a new one every day.
More chapter-by-chapter shows: The Body Keeps the Score · No Bad Parts · Atlas of the Heart · Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? · Don't Believe Everything You Think · The Courage to Be Disliked
Educational commentary and review only — not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Lori Gottlieb or the publisher. All discussion is transformative and used under Fair Use. No copyright infringement intended. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.