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.

Last weekend, at a friend’s suggestion, my husband and I watched the 2013 film The Lunchbox—a surprisingly moving and unexpected love story that unfolds through something almost quaint by today’s standards: handwritten notes.

The premise is simple and quietly heartbreaking. Ila (Nimrat Kaur) wants to recapture her husband’s dwindling attention. Sensing they’ve fallen into a rut, she hopes that elevating his daily lunch—once routine, now carefully spiced and lovingly prepared—might awaken his affection.

The film is shot on location in Mumbai, where the city’s legendary dabbyawallas deliver fresh, homemade lunches from household kitchens to offices across the city through an astonishingly precise delivery system. In a rare error, Ila’s lunch is mistakenly delivered not to her husband, but to Mr. Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), an older, isolated widower nearing retirement after more than thirty years as an insurance claims officer. His work is methodical, lonely, and as monotonous as his personal life.

When Ila’s husband complains about “her” cooking—which is actually the mediocre takeout Mr. Fernandes typically receives—Ila realizes her lovingly prepared meals are landing in the wrong hands. She slips a note into the lunch container to explain. When Mr. Fernandes replies, a tender and witty correspondence begins. Over time, the two strangers become confidants, sharing longings, disappointments, and the small details of their inner lives.

(With today’s explosion of food delivery apps and single-use plastic, the dabbawallas’ clean, reusable metal lunch containers feel like characters in their own right—and a quiet, compelling alternative vision of care and sustainability. But that may be another movie, or at least another conversation.)

The Lunchbox understands that loneliness is a disease of both heart and soul—and that it can exist both inside and outside of a romantic partnership. Ila’s aunt insists that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and the film plays gently with this idea. Ultimately, though, it is the written word—not the food—that becomes the most loving gesture of all.

There is something deeply nostalgic about how true the film feels. It reminds us that not so long ago, writing—slow, intentional, written by human hands—was a primary way we reached for one another. In a world now dominated by instant, disposable messages, The Lunchbox offers a quiet reminder: being seen, named, and responded to may be the most sustaining nourishment of all.

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.

“Do any human beings every realize life while they live it?”

I saw Thornton Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town at some point during my childhood and remembered it vaguely. Mostly I remembered that the plot followed two young people in a small town falling in love and that the boy loved baseball. I recently read Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake, which centers around various productions of this play. Patchett’s novel shares Our Town’s emphasis on the theme that life happens most profoundly during our small daily moments. Reading this novel, I realized it was time to revisit the play.

My curiosity was well timed, as Kenny Leon’s production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre opened recently though the production plans have been in the works for this ensemble since the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that this production was, in part, conceptualized during the stay-at-home orders is interesting, given the play’s emphasis on quiet moments, stillness, and the passage of time. This is Our Town’s fifth return to Broadway.

There is so much to say about this superb production led by Jim Parson’s fearless performance as the stage manager. His take is edgy and somewhat sardonic and thus sets the stage for an unsentimental unfolding which ironically leads the audience to especially emotional and heartfelt conclusions.

The play’s three acts — Daily Life (set in 1901), Love and Marriage (set in 1904) and a final act set 9 years later in the local cemetery – unfold during a gripping 80 minutes with no intermission. The simple earnest arc of daily life makes all the characters in the small, fictional, New England town of Grover’s Corners seem vulnerable and deeply human. This play challenges us to understand that we cry during weddings and graduations and life’s grander milestones in part because we are all unbearably vulnerable. We never know what life will throw at us during the journey of the everyday small moments that define the arc of a life. If only the mysteries of the line between life and death were clearer, we might be able to learn from our loved ones who are no longer with us. And we might even see each other more lucidly and with even more compassion and love.

Reading or viewing this play would be a wonderful way to begin 2025 with renewed awe and abandon.

Ann Patchett’s 2023 novel, Tom Lake, is a relationally-oriented therapist’s dream. A love letter both to northern Michigan’s cherry farms and to small-town family life, Patchett’s novel unpacks how greater emotional maturity is conducive to choosing healthier, more sustainable romantic partnerships.

The novel begins during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic while protagonist Lara is quarantining with her three daughters and her husband on their cherry farm in northern Michigan. With the world at a standstill, Lara’s daughters insist that she finally share with them the story from her early adulthood when she dated a young actor who went on to become the world’s most famous movie star. Lara’s three daughters worship the devastatingly handsome Peter Duke and demand that their mother finally give them the backstory. Reluctantly, and with strict and entertaining boundaries, Lara agrees.

What unfolds is a moving tale of a young, innocent and unassuming girl plucked from small town life in part because of her uncanny ability to portray small-town life through her performance in the lead role (Emily) in various productions of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town. Lara’s youthful whirlwind romance with Duke is a classic Hollywood tale of innocence lost and how the spotlight of fame corrupts and contorts. Tom Lake’s plot toggles between Lara’s quarantine with her close-knit family and the complexities of life on the farm and Lara’s detailed description of her years as a young, unsuspecting, aspiring starlet. Heartache, sibling rivalry, and family love are concurrent themes, and Our Town’s cherishment of the wholesomeness of small-town life works as a convincing psychological template for emotional maturity and the beauty of healthy choices and a quiet, connected, authentic life.

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!

This phrase – despite and because of its grammatical flaw – was written and spoken and repeated by several social work professors in my early graduate training. A willingness to refrain from my own agenda in order to respect and deeply probe the psychological space and experience of my therapy clients is essential to my own clinical practice. Clinicians employ therapeutic strategies that allow us to challenge and guide and inject theory. But at the core of effective therapeutic work, the clinician must possess the emotional flexibility to respect each client’s unique reality and perspective.

Atul Gawande’s magnificent bestselling book,Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” frames an approach to end-of-life decision making and care that respects this essential social work guiding principle. A surgeon and staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Medical School, Gawande has authored several bestselling books. Being Mortal explores how the trajectory of modern medicine’s success revolutionizing the dangers of birth and management of disease has evolved to a pattern of extending life above all else. Sometimes life is extended with blatant or even negligent disregard for patient preferences and priorities.

The problem with medicine and the institutions It has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet – and this is the painful paradox – we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It’s been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs.

Gawande masterfully challenges this default experiment. He points to creative approaches to senior living like infusing care facilities with plants and pets and farm animals. He does a deep and illuminating dive into hospice care and calls for providers to take the time to explore and respect each patient’s priorities. He features the palliative care specialist Susan Block as a moral compass with the potential to reframe the approach to end of life care:

“You have to understand,” Block told me. “A family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation.” One basic mistake is conceptual. To most doctors, the primary purpose of a discussion about terminal illness is to determine what people want – whether they want chemo or not, whether they want to be resuscitated or not, whether they want hospice or not… “A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the over-whelming anxiety – anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about loved ones, anxiety about finances…” No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany…The words you use matter. According to palliative specialists, you shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry things turned out this way,” for example, it can sound like you are distancing yourself. You should say, “I wish things were different.” You don’t ask, “What do you want when you are dying?” You ask, “If time becomes short, what is most important to you?”

Gems of knowledge like the above quotations are laced throughout Being Mortal’s brave mining of the difficult topic of terminal illness and the near taboo topics of dying and death. This difficult, illuminating, transformational read enhances my clinical skills and reminds me that being where the client is at is a lifelong, essential goal.

The book jacket for Diary of a Mad Housewife describes the novel as “a classic of urban women’s fiction that gave a wry voice to the nascent feminist stirrings of the 1960s.” I’m not sure how I missed it on my mother’s bookshelf while growing up in the 70s, but she confirms that it was right there all along with prominent placement. This engrossing page-turner eventually became a popular Academy Award nominated film, and is full of extremes. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, Sue Kaufman’s best-selling novel paints a portrait of city life in the 1960s that demonstrates how much has changed and how much has stayed the same.

Despite how often characters telephone local shops and charge groceries to their monthly tabs, and a 200 dollar business suit described as an obscene expense, the novel reads as remarkably current. Kaufman’s take on the challenges of motherhood, identity, marriage, and sexual intimacy withstands the test of time.

We meet the novel’s protagonist, Betina (or “Teen” as her husband Jonathan calls her), when she decides to keep a diary as a fitful attempt to cope with the escalating pressures and chaos of her life as a Manhattan housewife. Betina hopes that journaling will help her make sense of her aggressive social life and growing discomfort with the family’s superficial trajectory. She knows she needs help and she finds reading as therapeutic (and comic) as journaling. D.H. Lawrence is among her comforts, as she enjoys the satirical timing while reading as her husband readies himself for bed:

“What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost it seemed to her, she married him because she disliked him, in a secret, physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had seemed, in some way, her master, beyond her.” I read it three times, and was going over it a forth when Jonathan came out of the bathroom and got into bed. I sat gripping the book, waiting: it was exactly the sort of ironic moment for him to propose a Roll in the Hay. It never failed.

Betina’s diary guides readers through excessive substance use, an extramarital affair, way too many taxi rides, and a slew of raucous cocktail parties that might make certain middle-aged readers feel a little bit boring! At its most depressing, the diary is testament to how easily financial success can lead families down a superficial and dismal path. But the novel’s conclusion feels modestly hopeful and alludes to the possibility that therapy can be worthwhile, even with a substandard therapist. Reading and journaling are, indeed, therapuetic, and authentic change is possible. This cheeky novel captivated readers when published in 1967, and can be healthy bibliotherapy for mothers navigating multiple relationship challenges.

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.

Of my pre and post-surgical reading, Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger offered the most meaningful and memorable frame for navigating physical adversity. The book chronicles her fascinating career in film and television but focuses on the long-standing psychological impact of trauma and the challenges of recovering from traumatic a physical injury.

Polley is widely known throughout Canada for her childhood role as Sara Stanley in the wildly popular television series Avonlea (1990-1996). She has starred in several films including Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. But it is Polley’s work as a screenwriter and director which fully showcases her astonishing talent.

She has written and directed two of the most realistic films about infidelity ever made. Away From Her (2006) won Polley the Canadian Screen Award for Best Director and demonstrates how one can forgive a spousal betrayal but may never forget it. Take This Waltz (2011) stars Michelle Williams, Luke Kirby, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman in a study of the human tendency to want what we don’t have. I often suggest one or both films to therapy clients who are navigating the discovery of a spousal betrayal.

Polley’s 2012 The Stories We Tell won the best film of the year award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. The film unpacks a family secret about Polley’s parents’ marriage years after her mother’s death. This unforgettable autobiographical documentary showcases the director’s depth and innate understanding of complex familial bonds and the power of denial. Interestingly, this film and its revelation are not explored in her book.

Polley also wrote a memorable New York Times article about Harvey Weinstein soon after the revelations surfaced about his predatory crimes.

Clearly, I am a fan of her work. So if Polley writes a book about how trauma shapes the body and her journey through multiple health challenges and a concussion that forced her to drop out of plans to write and direct the film Little Women, I am keen to read it regardless of my foot surgery.

Polley writes earnestly and honestly about the traumatizing underbelly of childhood stardom. Part of Polley’s appeal is that she may be the least vain, least materialistic film star with the smallest ego in entertainment history. She was breaking ground for female filmmakers way before it became a hashtag or a movement. Weinstein tried to seduce her by telling her he could make her an even bigger star, but even as a young girl, she did not want to be a star, she wanted to write and direct. This depth and resolve fuse her account of the myriad of trauma and adversity she faced as a child actor with somewhat absent parents, vicious scoliosis, dramatically lopsided breasts and chronic pain.

At times, it seems Polley may not fully appreciate the breadth of rare door openings her stardom affords her. But maybe that’s because she seems so profoundly disinterested in being a star. The book is full of powerful behind-the-scenes accounts of her experience as a young actor, as a patient hospitalized with a high-risk pregnancy, as an early member of the Me Too movement and a tireless activist. But it is her journey fighting to recover from her three-year concussion that resonates most with my therapeutic training. Polley works with multiple experts and specialists and remains largely incapacitated for several years. As the title suggests, healing comes only when she finds a doctor who insists she run toward rather than away from her pain. Diving into excruciating physical pain runs a parallel track with excavating her traumatic childhood history. The book reads as if it was necessary that she write it in order to fully heal. By running toward her danger, this strong woman comes out even stronger on the other side.