Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Interleaved with her own hours are the people she treats, rendered with enough care that they stay with you. There's John, a hostile, wildly successful television writer who calls everyone around him an idiot, including Gottlieb, and who arrives in her office insulated in armor so thick it takes months to find the grief underneath. There's Julie, a young newlywed professor who gets a terminal cancer diagnosis just as her life is opening up, and who spends her sessions not falling apart but working out, with startling practicality, how to live while dying.

There's Rita, in her late sixties, so convinced she's ruined her life and her children's that she's given herself a private deadline — if things haven't changed by her next birthday, she plans to end it. And there's Charlotte, a young woman in her twenties who drinks too much and chases unavailable men, reenacting a childhood chaos she can name but can't yet stop. Each of them arrives with a story about why they are the way they are, and each story is both true and quietly imprisoning. The stories aren't lies. They're just partial, and the partiality is where the trouble lives.

One of the quietly radical things the book does is demystify the mechanics. Therapy, in Gottlieb's telling, isn't advice, and it isn't a warm bath of validation. It's a relationship — often the most honest one a person has — used as a kind of instrument. The therapist watches how the patient treats them, because that's usually how the patient treats everyone. The room becomes a small, safe laboratory where old patterns show up in real time and can, for once, be named. What happens between the two chairs is a live sample of what happens everywhere else in a person's life.

She's frank about the tools and their limits. She invokes the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's idea that between stimulus and response there's a space, and in that space lies our freedom — the possibility of choosing our reaction rather than being run by it. Much of therapy is widening that space. She talks about the difference between the pain we can't avoid and the suffering we manufacture on top of it by refusing to accept what's already happened. She points out that people come in wanting to change others, and the work is helping them see the only person in the room they can actually change is themselves.

Late in the book, Wendell offers Gottlieb an image she can't shake: people are like prisoners who hold the key to their own cells, standing at the bars, pressing on them, complaining bitterly of their confinement — and never noticing they could simply walk out. The bars are the stories we've decided are non-negotiable. I can't leave this job, this relationship, this version of who I am. And more often than we'd like to admit, the door was never locked. We stay because leaving means giving up the story, and the story, however painful, is familiar.

This is the widest thing the memoir reaches for, and it stays anchored in its people. John is imprisoned by the belief that feeling grief would destroy him. Rita is imprisoned by the certainty that it's too late. Charlotte is imprisoned by the comfort of chaos, which at least she knows how to survive. And Gottlieb, for all her training, is imprisoned by the story that a happy, competent person doesn't fall apart over a breakup — a story that keeps her from asking what the breakup actually exposed: her own fear of mortality, of time running out, of the life she hasn't fully chosen.

The breakup that opens the book turns out to be almost a red herring. What Gottlieb is really grieving, she discovers across her hours with Wendell, is time — the awareness, sharpened by a health scare and by Julie's dying, that her own life is finite and partly unlived. She doesn't get the boyfriend back, and she doesn't want to by the end. She gets something less cinematic and more durable: the ability to sit inside uncertainty without frantically trying to escape it.