I have spent a significant portion of my adult life in therapy. I say that without embarrassment — it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. So when I heard that a therapist had written a book about becoming a patient herself, I was immediately curious.

Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is unlike any book about mental health I've read. It's funny, for one thing. Genuinely funny. Which I didn't expect, and which made me love it all the more.

Gottlieb weaves together two storylines: her own experience entering therapy after a painful breakup, and the stories of four patients she's treating simultaneously. The result is something that feels less like a self-help book and more like a novel — except it's all real, and it hits accordingly.

What struck me most was how human she makes the whole enterprise of therapy feel. The therapist is not some all-knowing figure sitting behind a notepad. She's a person, working through her own stuff, trying to show up fully for others while also figuring out how to show up for herself. That felt true to my own experience in ways I hadn't seen reflected in print before.

She also writes beautifully about what therapy actually is — not a place where someone fixes you, but a place where you learn to see yourself more clearly. Where you start to understand the patterns you've been running on autopilot for years. Where, slowly, things begin to shift.

I've recommended this book to people who are in therapy, people who are skeptical of therapy, and people who have never considered it. All of them came back to me saying the same thing: I couldn't put it down.

That's the mark of something special. Read it.