REVIEW:

I recently wrapped up my 3-star review of the uber-popular Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by saying maybe I should talk to someone…else. Well, I found her, and she’s a monster.

As of today, Lori Gottlieb’s therapy-themed memoir has 152,020 Goodreads ratings. Meanwhile, Catherine Gildiner’s lesser-known Good Morning, Monster only has 2,298. I hope I can change that.

The book’s subtitle - A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery - is the perfect content summary. I was actually surprised to find that the patients she profiled weren’t psychopaths given the “monster” in the primary title. Rather, they were just people trying to be functioning adults after horrible (HORRIBLE) childhoods. Case in point, a woman whose hateful mother greeted her each day with, “good morning, monster.”

Gottlieb’s 368-page professional memoir is broken into five parts. Each part covers the start-to-finish treatment of one patient, and I loved this structure. Staying with someone from the beginning of their story to the end really helped me focus on their psychological growth and understand how the therapy worked. I found the author to be very candid in her successes and failures with these patients, sharing different strategies she implemented well and mistakes that caused setbacks. While I’m not in the psychology field, I learned a lot about human nature that’s easily applicable to everyday life.

I also appreciated that at the end of each section, she shared how she approached the patient to discuss including their story in the book. Hearing these details made it easier to not worry their confidences had been compromised. They wanted others to benefit from their experiences, and in that and many other regards, they were, in fact, heroes.

I highly recommend Good Morning, Monster to anyone who loved Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, or who like me was looking for something similar but someone else.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

In this fascinating narrative, therapist Catherine Gildiner's presents five of what she calls her most heroic and memorable patients. Among them: a successful, first generation Chinese immigrant musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman whose father abandoned her at age nine with her younger siblings in an isolated cottage in the depth of winter; and a glamorous workaholic whose narcissistic, negligent mother greeted her each morning of her childhood with Good morning, Monster.

Each patient presents a mystery, one that will only be unpacked over years. They seek Gildiner's help to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering has been long buried.

As in such recent classics as The Glass Castle and Educated, each patient embodies self-reflection, stoicism, perseverance, and forgiveness as they work unflinchingly to face the truth. Gildiner's account of her journeys with them is moving, insightful, and sometimes very funny. Good Morning Monster offers an almost novelistic, behind-the-scenes look into the therapist's office, illustrating how the process can heal even the most unimaginable wounds.