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

By Lori Gottlieb

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 415 pp. $28

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Lori Gottlieb is a Beverly Hills therapist who wants to let you know that she's just like everyone else. "Of all my credentials as a therapist, the most significant is that I am a card-carrying member of the human race," she writes in her new book, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone." Gottlieb, who is also the "Dear Therapist" columnist for the Atlantic, wants to show us not only her own humanity but also that of her patients. She throws open the door on sessions when she's in the chair - and on others when she's on the couch. The result is a dishy romp, an eavesdropper's guilty pleasure that - perhaps not surprisingly - is already being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria and ABC.

Gottlieb gets off to a flying start. On Page 1, we're in her office, where she's with a new patient, "John." (All names and identifying information have been blurred.) John is "stressed out." He's having trouble sleeping and getting along with his wife. He needs "help managing the idiots" in his life, he tells Gottlieb. John says he's chosen Gottlieb because she's a "nobody" in Los Angeles, so he doesn't have to worry about running into his Hollywood colleagues near her office. Gottlieb doesn't flinch then, or when he gives her "a wad of cash" as payment, to hide from his wife that he's seeing a therapist.

"You'll be like my mistress," he says. Or rather, "more like my hooker. No offense," he adds, "but you're not the kind of woman I'd choose as a mistress ... if you know what I mean." Gottlieb is only mildly offended. "I figured that this comment was just one of John's defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being." To herself she mutters, "Have compassion, have compassion, have compassion." John never makes it easy, and part of the joy of the book is watching his emotions - and Gottlieb's - evolve over time.

If only John knew: Gottlieb herself is in a vulnerable spot. "Boyfriend," the man she thought she was going to marry, has just ended their relationship. Divorced with teenage children, Boyfriend says he wants to marry Gottlieb but doesn't want her young son (who was conceived with sperm from a sperm bank as Gottlieb neared 40 without a husband on the horizon) in the picture. "You can't order me up a la carte, like a burger without the fries," she shouts at him, and decides she needs to return to therapy herself.

Soon enough, Gottlieb chooses "Wendell" as her therapist, thereby becoming one of the roughly 30 million people in therapy in the United States at any given time. Although about three-quarters of the clinicians who practice therapy in the United States are women (Gottlieb's book is replete with such facts and figures), she has selected a man to be her therapist, a married man with children, because she wants to see if an "objective male professional who has firsthand experience of marriage and kids - a man just like Boyfriend - will be as appalled by Boyfriend's behavior" as she is.

The book alternates between Gottlieb's therapy with Wendell and the therapy she does with John; with "Julie," a 33-year-old professor coping with a cancer diagnosis; with "Rita," 69, a thrice-divorced woman with suicidal ideation; and with "Charlotte," an anxious, untethered 25-year-old with an unacknowledged drinking problem.

Gottlieb also offers a few autobiographical chapters. She likes to share - and to stir the pot. In 2000, she published a memoir, "Stick Figure," that divulged the contents of her diary as an 11-year-old struggling with anorexia. Ten years later, in the book "Marry Him," she ruffled many a feather by suggesting that ambitious, unmarried 30-something women were being too picky when it came to finding a man.

Gottlieb can be provocative and entertaining, but her prose often descends into psychobabble; she overuses the f-word, along with additional expletives; and she quotes from a few too many psychiatrists and psychologists.

But by tearing down boundaries, Gottlieb gives us more than a voyeuristic look at other people's problems (including her own).