So when a client tells me a book moved him, I listen. When several clients mention the same book, I consider it part of my continuing education. And when my adult daughter brings Heart the Lover by Lily King on vacation and can’t put it down, I pay attention.

I came to this novel without having read King’s companion book, Writers & Lovers. I will likely circle back. But Heart the Lover stands beautifully on its own—a work of elegant prose that captures both the innocence and the psychological complexity of young adulthood.

We follow a protagonist whose name is withheld until the final pages, a choice that feels psychologically intentional. Identity, after all, is not fixed in youth—it is constructed, tested, defended, and revised in relationship. Within an intoxicating circle of collegiate friends who both intimidate and inspire her, she becomes “Jordan,” a version of herself that feels braver, sharper, more socially fluent. She falls into a love triangle that ultimately crystallizes into something deeper: a connection between two ambitious, idealistic young people who want their lives to matter.
What unfolds is tender and devastating in equal measure. King captures something rare: the almost sacred intensity of first adult love. It is fragile. It is precarious. It is infused with longing and projection. And it is often unsustainable—not because the love is false, but because the people inside it are still becoming.

That is where the novel feels especially relevant to my work as a therapist.

Heart the Lover is not simply a romance. It is a study in development. It shows how profoundly we are shaped by our families—by what was spoken, and what was not; by what was expected, and what was silently demanded. The characters are intelligent and sincere. They want to love well. But wanting and being ready are not the same thing.

Many young adults carry into romance unresolved family dynamics, unexamined fears, and unconscious loyalties. The capacity for intimacy requires differentiation—the ability to remain oneself while moving toward another. And that capacity often lags behind longing.

What I admire most about King’s writing is her portrayal of the approach–avoidance dance so common in love: the simultaneous pull toward closeness and retreat from it. In one scene, the narrator waits at baggage claim for the man she loves. Her anticipation is electric; her body is alive with sensation. Yet she recognizes a quiet truth: if he fully understood the depth of her love, it would terrify him.
That moment captures something universal. Intimacy exposes us. To be loved is to be seen. And to be seen can feel dangerous when we are still uncertain of ourselves.

Alongside this exquisite rendering of young love, King writes with unusual clarity about existential awakening. Her characters metabolize pain in real time. They feel it in their bodies. They struggle with it. And through it, they become more conscious, more deliberate, more themselves.

As both a therapist and a mother of adult children, I find myself moved by that arc. Youthful love is rarely tidy. It can be misguided, misaligned, or mistimed. And yet it is formative. It shapes the nervous system. It clarifies values. It exposes vulnerabilities that must eventually be integrated.
In that way, heartbreak is not the opposite of growth. It is often its catalyst.

And perhaps that is why so many of my clients—and my daughter—pressed this book into my hands. It does what good fiction does best: it illuminates the private terrain of becoming.

Families, relationships, and communities shape us in ways both obvious and invisible. Jonathan Spector’s This Much I Know explores how our personal histories, inherited beliefs, and the stories we tell ourselves collide—sometimes painfully, sometimes with unexpected insight. In this beautifully acted play, competing truths coexist, challenging us to sit with ambiguity and consider how context shapes conviction.

Therapists understand that children can grow up in the same family and yet experience profoundly different childhoods. A couple can weather the same adversity and later remember it as if they lived through two separate realities. In therapy, two competing truths can share the same space—though it is rarely an easy space to inhabit.

The question of competing narratives frames This Much I Know, which recently left a successful run at Theater J in Washington, D.C., for New York’s 59E59 Theaters. A superb trio of actors fluidly inhabit multiple roles through subtle shifts in costume, accent, and setting, creating a world where memory, identity, and ideology overlap.

We first meet Lukesh (Firdous Bamji), a psychology professor whose dry humor and knowing detachment come through as he asks the audience to silence their phones and launches into a lecture on confirmation bias. His wife, Natalya (Dani Stoller), wrestles with the aftermath of a traumatic experience, channeling her turmoil into research for a book about her grandmother—who fled Russia and was rumored to have been a childhood friend of Stalin’s daughter.
Natalya leaves Lukesh early in the play, while Harold (Ethan Rapp), a university student, faces a reckoning of his own when a news story exposes him as the son of a prominent white supremacist. He insists he doesn’t share all of his father’s beliefs, but no professor will sponsor his thesis—except Lukesh, who reluctantly agrees. Their charged exchanges about truth, bias, and belonging become the play’s intellectual core, while Natalya’s search for her grandmother’s story, and her portrayal of Stalin’s daughter, add layers of haunting symmetry.

Questions of ownership, blame, the butterfly effect, genetics, and epigenetics weave through the dialogue. This Much I Know resists easy answers and refuses to label narratives as right or wrong. Instead, it invites the audience to sit with ambiguity—to consider how context shapes conviction, and how difficult it is to break free from the gravitational pull of family legacy.

Like therapy itself, the play offers no tidy resolution. It asks us to tolerate complexity, to listen for truth in stories that contradict our own, and to recognize that understanding—like healing—requires curiosity more than certainty.

On the surface, they’re frothy and absurd: wealthy women in fabulous wardrobes, meticulously designed mansions, murder mysteries, and eccentric philanthropists. But look closer, and they’re each telling a deeper story about trauma, birth order, and the bonds that form between sisters who survive dysfunctional families in very different ways.

Chaos Enters the Penthouse
In The Better Sister, Nicky Macintosh (Elizabeth Banks) makes a dramatic reentry into her younger sister Chloe’s life by showing up, un-welcomed, to her pristine Manhattan penthouse. A murder investigation is already underway—Chloe’s husband, who also happens to be Nicky’s ex-husband, has just been found dead. Chloe Taylor (Jessica Biel) is an influential media figure with a picture-perfect life and an image she’s desperate to maintain. Nicky, by contrast, is messy, contrarian, and undeniably inconvenient.

Meanwhile, in Sirens, Devon DeWitt (Meghann Fahy) is released from a night in jail and returns to care for her ailing father. She discovers that her younger sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), has sent an elaborate edible arrangement which is much more performative than helpful. Furious, Devon grabs the display in her car and sets out to confront her sister. She finds Simone at the legendary “Cliff House” working for Michaela “Kiki” Kell (Julianne Moore), a hyper-stylized billionaire philanthropist. Simone has abandoned her upstate New York identity for headbands, cheekiness, and florals. Her tattoos have been removed and Devon finds her almost unrecognizable.

Devon and Nicky are cut from the same chaotic cloth. Both speak in cringey, grammatically obtuse sentences, wear the wrong clothes, and offend nearly everyone they encounter. Law enforcement doesn’t know what to make of them, and their younger sisters—Simone and Chloe—vacillate between embarrassment, protectiveness, and avoidance. They’ve both tried to leave the past behind. But the past, in the form of their big sister, has other plans in store for them.

As a therapist, I often see how unresolved trauma shows up in family relationships. What’s psychologically compelling about Sirens and The Better Sister is how they depict strikingly similar responses to childhood trauma. Both shows invert the familiar sibling stereotype. In many families, the older child plays the achiever, the responsible one, while the younger rebels. But in homes shaped by trauma, especially when the mother is absent or compromised, it’s often the eldest daughter who bears the brunt of the father’s rage. She becomes the shield. And that role comes with consequences—depression, addiction, a deep sense of unworthiness.

In both of these current popular shows, the older sister copes through acting out, numbing, and self-destruction. The younger sister copes by striving, perfecting, and escaping.
Both sets of sisters come from profoundly abusive or neglectful households. The fathers are violent, controlling, or cruel; the mothers are absent, weak, or complicit. In both stories, the older sister—despite her flaws—tried to protect the younger one. But as adults, both younger sisters survive through secrecy, deception and feigned perfection.

Camp with a Core
Sirens and The Better Sister are not high art. They’re over-the-top, glossy, and often ridiculous—streaming’s version of a beach read. But that doesn’t mean they’re devoid of meaning. When the sisters in both shows are forced to confront one another, old wounds resurface. They lash out, shut down, try to run. But in fleeting, tender moments, the emotional core glimmers through: a look, a shared memory, a flash of loyalty or sorrow.

In families marked by danger, siblings often become the only witnesses to the full story. They remember what others can never fully understand. Their bond may be fraught or fractured, but it’s also forged in shared survival. One may long to forget; the other may be paralyzed by what she remembers. That tension, and the love that sometimes endures beneath it, is where these shows find their emotional resonance.

I can’t recommend Sirens or The Better Sister for their realism, narrative logic, or emotional nuance. But I can say this: the messy connection between sisters shaped by trauma is something these shows surprisingly get right. The glitz may be superficial—but the emotional truth, in moments, rings loud and clear.

The results are in: Mikey Madison has officially taken home the Oscar for Best Actress, capping off an incredible awards season where she also won the Independent Spirit Award and the BAFTA. In a historic night, Anora dominated the Academy Awards, proving that its raw intensity and indie roots were no barrier to Hollywood’s top prize. Anora is the film with the lowest budget ever to win best picture.

Directed by Sean Baker, Anora is a striking commentary on wealth, power, and sex work—a clear reminder that, despite progress, it is still a man’s world. Baker, known for his 2015 iPhone-shot indie hit Tangerine, once again spotlights the lives of sex workers with unflinching realism and respect. His protagonist, Anora, or Ani as she prefers, is a New York City-based stripper and escort. Her grandmother never learned English, so she speaks a bit of Russian. When Ivan, the reckless, entitled son of a Russian oligarch, requests a dancer who speaks his language, Ani is the obvious match. Their chemistry is immediate, but their connection—like so many modern relationships—is built on performance and illusion.

Ani presents herself as confident and agreeable, masking the harsh realities of her profession with a well-practiced charm. Ivan, meanwhile, embodies unchecked privilege, approaching his surroundings—both in terms of people and places—as a limitless playground. Their relationship escalates when Ivan offers Ani $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week—a transaction she negotiates matter-of-factly. As their dynamic deepens, the film peels back their façades. Ani is not just a seductress; she is a vulnerable young woman in pain. Ivan is not just a playboy; he is an impotent child lost in excess. Together, they expose the thin line between self-deception and survival.

As a therapist who works with many clients navigating modern dating, what makes Anora especially compelling is how it mirrors common challenges of real-world courtship. Beneath the film’s exaggerated scenario lies a universal truth: in early relationships, people often wear masks. Ani feigns enjoyment of bad sex. Ivan convinces himself he’s falling in love. Their self-delusions unravel when reality—in the form of Ivan’s furious parents—comes crashing into town.

I often remind clients that rushing into intimacy can cloud judgment. The modern dating landscape makes slow, intentional connection increasingly rare. Ani and Ivan’s memorable, marvelous, heartbreaking story serves as a cautionary tale. Their circumstances may be extreme, but the emotional risks they take are all too familiar. In the end, Anora forces audiences to confront uncomfortable truths—about power, relationships, and the transactional nature of desire.

With its Oscar triumph, Anora is no longer just a critical darling—it’s an undeniable cinematic milestone. And Madison’s fearless performance has been rightfully celebrated as one of the most unforgettable in recent memory.
If you are interested, check out my original version of this post – pre-oscars, on Psychology .Today

The late Shirley Glass, a prominent infidelity researcher, encouraged an ideal script at the outset. Her suggestion is that when a married person notices a spark with another, it is highly advisable to discuss this spark with one’s spouse. To say something like:

“I was having coffee with Lucy today and I felt surprised that our conversation quickly became both personal and flirtatious. I was also surprised that I enjoyed it. It reminded me of how you and I used to be with one another, and I want to try to get that back. Can we work on that?”

If only more married adults chose to run this script.

Elizabeth Stroud’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, is one of her very best. In a showcase that feels something like a finale, she allows her beloved, previously unacquainted characters from her various critically acclaimed series to intersect and collide with one another in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Set during the later part of the pandemic, the novel begins with the meek, brilliant novelist Lucy Barton having recently befriended the angsty attorney Bob Burgess. The friendship has become romantic, though Lucy and Bob remain in denial of their palpable romantic spark. They believe they are good friends and insist their frequent walks are covid-friendly and purely platonic. Quirky local fixture Olive Kitteridge (of Stroud’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name) understands the blossoming romance between Lucy and Bob and easily sees straight through their blind spots. Olive’s friendships with Lucy and Bob animate the novel as does the plot’s unfolding murder mystery.

Stroud understands that intimate life happens in the small quiet moments rather than the large romantic gestures. Lucy and Bob cherish their deep unfiltered conversations. Lucy calls Bob a sin eater because she understands that Bob has sacrificed to much for others, especially his older brother. Lucy opens up about her impoverished and abusive childhood:

“But I don’t remember feeling envious a lot, Bob, and I don’t understand that. You would think, I would think, that I would have been envious of people from the start, all these mothers who seemed to love their children as they picked them up from school, all those kids who seemed to have normal lives, but I just somehow understood: That’s not my life. And I was always inside my head, and I remember thinking: I’m glad this is my head.”

Even Bob’s bad haircut illuminates the intricacy and hilarity of the human connection. He and Lucy both agree that it makes him look like a twelve-year-old with a man’s face, and their dual experiences of this unfortunate new style represent their powerful connection and the unexpected path forward.

Bob loves his wife, the minister of their local church. And Lucy loves her ex-husband William. Lucy and William reconnected during the pandemic and are giving it another go. Despite these satisfying unions, the chemistry fueling Lucy and Bob’s conversations anchor the plot and transfix these two central characters.

Emotional repairs, infidelity, betrayal, sexual abuse, neglect, isolation, therapy and memory are all important themes explored with rich emotional intelligence. And yet, as a therapist, what stays with me most about this beautiful story is its exploration of the road not taken.

Kimberly Akimbo, the most awarded musical of the 2023 Tony Awards, announced that it will hold its final Broadway performance on April 28th, 2024. If you have teenagers in your family or college students willing to hang with you over spring break, consider a family road trip to NYC to catch the show. Victoria Clark, who won best actress in a musical for her role as Kimberly, captivates the audience playing a fifteen-year-old with a rare condition that causes her to rapidly age well beyond her teenage years. Emotionally, she is as mature as any other hormonal, angsty teenager. Physically, she is post-menopausal, cardiac-comprised and well into her seventies.

While the Kimberly’s disease is fictional, it mimics projeria, a rare and fatal condition that inspired Rabbi Ariel Kushner Haber to write the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People about his son, Aaron, who died at age fourteen.

The play blends its exploration of the pain of being different with humor and depth and joy. And while the ending is morally problematic, the characters and their journey make up for this shortcoming. The play’s questionable conclusion can spark meaningful conversation with your teen or young adult family members, and Clark’s spectacular and convincing performance is surrounded by a gifted supporting cast. It turns out that all of the original cast has stuck with the show, which speaks to its on stage chemistry and is further reason to get your tickets before the curtain drops!

As a therapist, what the review leaves out that will be relevant to viewers in therapy, is its exploration of grief, traumatic loss and depression. A lot has changed since the 1970s — during which the film is set and captures magically — but the shame and secrecy that plagues so many with depressive disorders remains. And the Holdovers treats this topic with seriousness and sensitivity.

Sadie is a gifted, determined, Jewish mathlete making her way in a man’s world where the gamers dominating the field often embody as much toxic masculinity as the characters in their games. Sadie’s grandmother is a holocaust survivor. Sam and Marx are both half Asian. In addition to being mixed race and estranged from his biological father, Sam has a chronically ailing foot that leaves him crippled and eventually amputated. Otherness and trauma are thematic threads that bind this gaming trio.
The book is also a love letter to artists – the title itself a Shakespeare reference alluding to the artistic elements necessary to create any truly great work of art including a meaningful video game.

What makes this love story most unusual (and somewhat heartbreaking) is its focus on what it means to be professionally in love as souldmate collaborators who do not consummate a romance, but rather engage in a relationship that lives and breathes in the creative realm rather than the romantic. What does it mean to make magnificent wholly original creative work as an authentic team. What is it like to love, live and breathe the work – without consummating a romantic path? Sadie and Sam meet and befriend one another while playing video games as children in a hospital game room. And Sadie’s somewhat OCD betrayal of Sam leads to a multi-year estrangement that is interrupted when they run into one another as college students in Boston. Gaming once again brings them together. Their collaboration lasts decades and includes all sorts of slights and pain points and highs and lows that mimic the arc of a married life.

The therapist in me can’t help but root for the romance, but the book’s captivating appeal challenges conventional psychological thinking about love, marriage, careers and relationships. Gabrielle Zevin successfully tells a flourishing, memorable love story that is a true original.

As an empty nester I feel reasonably grounded when I reflect on my approach to raising our daughters. I wish that we had found a way to live abroad at some point. It never felt like the right time, and though my husband had professional opportunities that would have allowed for postings abroad, I did not want to pause my psychotherapy practice. Overseas adventures aside, I have little regret. Correction, I HAD little regret until I streamed the academy award nominated 28-minute documentary How Do You Measure a Year?

Director and father Jay Rosenblatt films his daughter Ella every year, on her birthday, asking her a series of the same questions. What would you like to do when you grow up? How do you feel about our relationship? What are dreams? And so on. An intense range of emotions surged through my experience viewing this super short film. Some moments are so hilariously funny and remind me that no one is funnier than a toddler. Some moments I felt such worry and wanted to make Ella a chocolate milkshake and connect her with a good therapist. Oddly, I became distracted by the sofa’s fabric and felt relieved the year it is reupholstered. Family love infuses each slice of conversation, from a grandmother’s doting interruption to an unexpected burst of song. Most of all, I felt regret that my husband and I did not think to structure a similar annual video tradition to mark the passage of each year.

It’s too late for us, but not too late for others. And I assume that any parents with young children will find surges of inspiration from this magnificent film and will follow through to build similar traditions. But the most important takeaway is not the idea of annual filming, it is the impact of the annual segments, spliced together into less than a half an hour, showing us that it all goes by so lightening fast. How Do You Measure a Year? Hopefully it is measured by cherishing each and every moment you possibly can.

Family therapists love a good genogram. For those unfamiliar with this term, a genogram is a comprehensive family history framed through the psychological lens of Family Systems Theory. Family Systems Theory is a relationally oriented approach to therapy emphasizing the formative importance of the family landscape. Systemic therapists believe that relational patterns are often passed down from one generation to the next and that early experiences shape adult patterns and choices.

In my work with therapy clients, our third and sometimes also our fourth session of therapy are entirely focused on a constructing a comprehensive genogram. I begin by drawing a map of circles and squares with horizontal lines connecting married couples and vertical lines between the married couples, connecting parents to their children. We discuss each family member’s role within the family unit, how siblings and parents get along, what parental relationships are like and what clients understand about what their parents’ lives were like growing up. I am particularly curious about grandparents and their marriages. It is surprisingly common to know very little about how one’s grandparents met or what their early courtship was like. I encourage clients who are comfortable doing so to ask their parents to tell them more about their grandparents. If grandparents are still living, I encourage clients to also speak with them and be curious to learn as much as they can about their lives. Family Systems Theory assumes that our grandparents’ stories are essential to our own, and that the human impulse to deny painful parts of a family history can be quite strong. The past is worthy of exploration as a gateway to deeper self-awareness and healing.

Tom Stoppard’s magnificent play, Leopoldstadt, is anchored through a meticulous genogram which is displayed for the audience in the middle of the playbill and also presented as a primary staging element of the play’s opening scene, titled “1899”. The horizonal and vertical lines track the 27 Austrian family members of the Merz and Jakobovicz family tree whose journey is traced through five scenes, each marked by the year – 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955. Emilia and Israel Merz and Estelle and Solomon Jakobovicz are “machatunim” — a Yiddish term referencing that their children Eva and Ludwig are married to each other. But this sophisticated, cultured group are not likely to speak Yiddish. They have assimilated into Austrian life, and we meet them on Christmas Eve 1899 gathered around a festive, unYiddish looking tree. One of the gleeful children places the Jewish star of David atop the tree and is told to take it down. The family and the audience erupt in laughter as the families’ conflicts about their Jewish faith shine brighter than the rejected Jewish star. The tension for the survival of the Jewish people and the lack of a Jewish homeland are consistent threads of conversation. Some family members have converted to Catholicism and several tense conversations challenge the characters and the audience to explore how difficult it is to acknowledge and understand current events as they unfold.

Denial and repressed memories shape each scene. By 1955, a dapper young Leo is one of only three remaining family members. Like Tom Stoppard, Leo has only a vague sense that he is Jewish. Like Stoppard, Leo writes popular, funny stories. Like Stoppard, Leo has changed his name so that it sounds less Jewish. Leo’s demeanor reflects how temping it can be to avoid the past. Even as his pasts lingers within and shapes who he has become.

Leopoldstadt is running through January 31, 2023 at the Longacre Theater in Times Square. While obviously intense, this important story challenges audiences to confront the impulse to look away.