Marriage
Celeste Ng’s 2014 debut novel about a Chinese-American family coping with the excruciating aftermath of a teenager’s death is as absorbing as it is humbling. It is absorbing due to its complex and realistic characters, each with their own layers and secrets and struggles related to the middle daughter, Lydia’s, mysterious disappearance and death. And…
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Lauren Groff Riverhead Books, 2015 391 pages When couples in therapy describe their relationship challenges, the delicate act of balancing separateness and togetherness surfaces as a recurring theme. Lauren Groff’s provocative 2015 novel, Fates and Furies, injects this theme with steroids and invites readers into a provocative narrative exploring the internal emotional worlds of two…
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Director: Andrew Haigh Writers: David Constantine (short story ‘In Another Country’) Andrew Haigh adaptation 1 hour, 35 minutes, December, 2015 Communication surfaces as a centerpiece for most couples in therapy. Married people often direct more effort towards communicating with children, friends and colleagues and less effort towards engaged discussions with their spouse. 45 Years was…
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Director: David Frankel Screenplay: Scott Frank and Don Roos Based on the book Marley & Me by John Grogan How do I balance the demands of my job and the needs of my kids? Should I work or stay at home while the kids are young? Should I take the job that pays the bills…
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Kim Edwards, 2006, 401 pages, Penguin Books Relationships and intimacy are an expected focus in psychotherapy. Most clients reach out to our practice because something is happening — or is not happening — in an important relationship or in several relationships. Some action-forcing event often makes it clear that something has to change in order…
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Women entrepreneurs and on-line shoppers alike can’t help but enjoy Anne Hathaway’s snappy, stylish performance as internet mogul Jules Ostin in Nancy Meyers’ 2015 film The Intern. The film’s tag line — “experience never gets old” — is a tribute to the wisdom and elegance of Ostin’s unlikely intern Ben Whittaker (Robert DeNiro), a seventy year old retired widow who…
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Alice Hoffman, Simon & Schuster, 2015 “I suppose this is what love can do to a woman, bring her into a garden at night, convinced she somehow can affect fate’s plan with her desire. Love like this was a mystery to me. I didn’t understand how people allowed sheer emotion to get the better of…
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Us David Nicholls 396 pages, 2014 “It was dizzying, really, to be in love at last. Because this was the first time, I knew that now. Everything else had been a misdiagnosis – infatuation, obsession perhaps, but an entirely different condition to this. This was bliss; this was transformative.” Despite pages of engaging writing about…
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“If age is just a state of mind, then While We’re Young is the best kind of therapy a forty something starting to lose touch with the younger generation could hope for.” Peter Debruge, Variety Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are settling into their forties and beginning to feel all washed up. Josh,…
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When a parent falls ill, the family constellation is bound to change, and multiple familial relationships usually become strained or strengthened, sometimes in unexpected ways. Most people decide to begin therapy because something has changed, and usually this change involves a family or relationship crisis. Since most of the clients in our therapy practice are…
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