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

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.

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.

When my book club selected Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel, Room, for our monthly read, I was not too psyched about revisiting this memorable, haunting tale. I saw the 2015 film in theaters and sat riveted through Brie Larson’s masterful performance which won her academy award for best actress in a lead role. Given the emotional impact of the film, I felt unmotivated to revisit the tale of five-year-old Jack and his mother (Ma) trapped in a tiny windowless space, held prisoner by the evil Old Nick while they plotted an unlikely escape.

I felt hesitant about returning to Jack’s fears when Old Nick would visit in the evenings and Jack was forced to hide in the closet (which doubled as his bedroom) and wonder why the bed kept banging against the wall and what Old Nick was doing on top of his mother. The horror of their ongoing captivity, the chill in the room when Old Nick did not pay the electric bill, the ongoing agony of Ma’s rotting teeth. These are some of the horrifying details I remembered. I was unsure about drudging up whatever details I had forgotten.

But Donoghue’s stunning novel captures the vivid corners of Jack’s inner emotional life much more deeply than the film. The book is told more completely from Jack’s earnest, innocent perspective. Jack may not like when Old Nick visits or seeing his mother despondent and comatose on the sporadic days when a paralyzing depression descends and immobilizes her. But Jack is content in their routine. He loves watching Dora the Explorer. He relishes trying to understand the difference between what exists inside the television and what exists outside in the world. He feels soothed by sensation of “having some” (his language for nursing) and his perspective remains mainly positive and satiated. Donohue manages to convey, through Jack’s descriptive perspective, the simultaneous experience of Ma’s ongoing trauma and her remarkable ability to shield Jack from her pain.

The bizarre and unimaginable circumstances of the plot set a stage that elegantly captures how profoundly young children form their world around their primary caregiving parent. Room is, at its core, a celebration of the immense power of unconditional love.

When Jack succeeds in Ma’s unlikely escape plan, the outside world causes a heartbreaking strain on their mother/child bond. After several years of captivity, they are finally freed! Jack is outside for the first time in his life, police are on the hunt for Old Nick, and all Jack wants to do is go back into the room and curl up in the only home he has ever known.

Once hospitalized for post traumatic medical, dental and mental health care, a well-intended therapist explains that his job is to help Jack recover from the trauma of living in the room and Jack thinks to himself:

“I don’t say because of manners, but he’s actually got it backwards. In Room I was safe and out here is scary.”

From a psychological perspective, the enclosed world of their room created a cocoon that met Jack’s primary needs for unconditional love and secure attachment. The room also delayed early developmental milestones of infant/mother separation and engagement with the external world. In this context, Jack’s believable and heartwarming headspace raises powerful insights about the bonds between mothers and children and how young children experience their world. The book is even more memorable than the film and I could read it all over again.

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.

As a systems therapist, family roles and dynamics are an important area of exploration. Developing a deeper understanding of the roles directly or indirectly assigned in childhood helps therapy clients reflect on how such roles are internalized and carried into adult careers and adult relationships. Developing a grasp of how past roles play out in the present makes the space to cultivate the adaptive elements of such roles and to challenge the maladaptive elements.

In this mode, the term “parentified child” is quite common. A parentified child references a child in a family unit who is directly or indirectly assigned an adult-like role. This assignment represents a family’s effort to compensate for parental shortcomings, limitations, adversity or absence. Many children raised by alcoholics, for example, will describe memories of caring for drunken parents or being sent by the sober parent into mature missions such as extracting the inebriated parent from a bar. For obvious reasons, memories of a parentified childhood may be quite painful and traumatic. But like so much in human relationships and in memory, relationships are complicated, families are unique, and parentified childhoods might also be laced with genuine happiness, joy and love.

Best picture academy award winner Coda is a beautiful film on many levels. From a therapeutic perspective, it captures the emotional complexity of a parentified childhood. The term Coda is an acronym standing for a child of deaf adults. (The word coda is defined as a concluding passage of a musical movement.) Coda’s protagonist, Ruby, has deaf parents and a deaf older brother. The film opens aboard the family’s fishing boat. Ruby and her father and brother are reeling in the day’s catch and preparing the fish for market sale. Music plays loudly, but Ruby’s father and brother seem oblivious. Only Ruby sways to the rhythm of the robust tunes. Viewers soon learn that Ruby is needed on the boat each day to meet regulatory requirements. All boating vessels must have a hearing individual aboard who can respond to coast guard alarms and notifications. Each morning, Ruby sails before sunrise and then dashes to high school where she doses off in class and struggles to balance the demands of academics with her familial obligations.

Ruby acts as her parents’ translator, protector and price negotiator. She must accompany them to doctor’s appointments and union meetings. The family’s livelihood seems completely dependent on Ruby’s engagement and support. Ruby embodies the quintessential parentified child. Her accountability toward her family is extreme. And yet, what makes Coda such a captivating film is the deep rapport and love and depth of Ruby’s family bonds. As Ruby and her parents struggle with the essential task of separation, the strengths and the complexity of the family dynamics are as challenging as they are endearing.

Ruby signs up for choir and the revelation and expression of her musical talent is entertaining and elevating. But Coda’s more substantive contribution is the complex portrayal of the strengths and dilemmas imbedded in the characters’ familial emotional life. Ruby is overly-responsible for her brother and parents’ welfare and safety. She cannot realize her full potential if she remains fully devoted to this parentified role. But the bonds framing her parentification demonstrate how sometimes one’s most unfortunate family role simultaneously illuminate both beauty and pain. Coda challenges a conventional understanding of what it means to operate in the parentified role and celebrates that sometimes our heaviest burdens also illuminate defining strengths.

Lucy Barton, a relatable and compelling underdog admired by readers everywhere, is back for a third round in Elizabeth Strout’s magnificent continuation of a journey that began in a small New York City hospital room. Fans fell in love with Lucy reading the novel showcasing her name. My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and the engrossing follow up Anything is Possible (2017) trace Lucy’s story and those in her orbit, as they navigate illness, betrayal, abuse and love. Some of us (myself included!) were fortunate enough to see a Laura Linney embody Lucy with abandon in the critically revered Broadway show based on the book (2019).

Oh William! (2021) picks up several years later as Lucy grieves the death of her adoring second husband. Despite widowhood, it feels satisfying to learn that Lucy finally knew intimate and fulfilling romantic love. And unsurprising that Lucy’s first husband and the father of her children, William, is on his third marriage which comes to an abrupt conclusion when his much younger wife suddenly moves out along with their teenage daughter. Lucy and William’s two daughters are both grown and married, and Lucy’s literary career has continued to blossom. While William is grappling with marital abandonment and the faltering of his career, he makes the shocking discovery that he has an older half-sister living in Maine. This nod to his mother’s mysterious past pushes William to seek solace in his amicable friendship with Lucy.

Lucy and William’s dual journey through their own grief brings them together, and they decide to travel to Maine to learn more about William’s mother’s past. Oh William! carries a plethora of insightful jewels along the way. The plot looks backwards contemplating the backstory about William’s half-sister and other unexplored chapters in Lucy and William’s earlier life together. Family secrets and betrayals are contemplated, and Lucy reflects on the devastating memories of uncovering William’s infidelity years earlier:

A tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt. It has stayed snapped, it never grew back. I began to write more truthfully after that.

Despite terrific professional success, the traumatic nature of Lucy’s childhood continues to define and drive her. Stroud understands this tension and continues to cultivate the inner emotional life of her protagonist, still trying to grow and understand and learn from her mistakes.

About authority: When I taught writing – which I did for many years – I talked about authority. I told the students that what was most important was the authority they went to the page with. And when I saw a photograph of Wilhelm Gerhardt in the library I thought: Oh, there is authority. I understood immediately why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It was not just his looks, it was the WAY he looked, as though he would do what he was told, but no one would ever have his soul…And – slowly – I realized this: This authority was why I had fallen in love with William. We crave authority. We do. No matter what anyone says, we crave that sense of authority. Of believing that in the presence of this person, we are safe.

Oh William! continues a memorable journey that will leave readers longing for more. I can’t wait to reconnect with Lucy when she is in her Eighties!

Years ago, I worked with a therapy client who reached out when she learned that her twenty-three-year-old daughter was addicted to opioids. Remembering early days of motherhood, my client sobbed recalling her struggles to balance a demanding career as an academic with her daughter’s pleas for attention and affection. Her daughter’s needs were obviously understandable. Nevertheless, life as a young working mother felt incredibly overwhelming and clashed with her understanding how women are socialized to envision motherhood.

“I would give anything to return her hugs now. And to play with her with abandon on our messy apartment floor. At the time I felt suffocated. I resented how much she needed, and I have so few memories of letting go and enjoying it.”

Streaming The Lost Daughter on Netflix yesterday, I naturally remembered this client. During our work together, she was able to drop everything and help her daughter become clean. But as a very young mother, her daughter’s pleas that she drop anything felt torturous.

In her directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts Elena Ferrente’s novel exploring the complex emotional experience of motherhood with depth and honesty. Olivia Coleman plays the protagonist, Leda, who has rented a Greek seaside apartment for an extended visit. Viewers quickly discover that Leda is awkward, elegant, distant and strange. She becomes transfixed with a young, glamorous, bikini-clad mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), and her young daughter who are close to her beach chair. Leda longingly eyes Nina frolicking in the sand, while Nina’s daughter clings to her mother’s taught body like an oversized choker. Late one afternoon, Nina’s daughter is lost on the beach, Leda finds her, and the two begin an odd and captivating acquaintance.

Nina’s manner with her daughter stirs Leda’s memories of young motherhood, and the film then begins to toggle between young Leda (Jessie Buckley) in her early twenties as a mom and present-day Leda (Coleman) in her mid-forties. Gyllenhaal does not look for tidy solutions or conclusive explanations. This is a messy film that asks deep questions about motherhood, freedom, sexuality and vitality. I found myself curious to know more about Leda’s own mother and her childhood experience. But the film works best in the contrast between what taboos it is willing to unpack and what it fails to explain.

The choice to convert one’s religion is a complicated one. Clinicians may view it as a rebellion or a conscious or unconscious effort to separate. Parents who are observant in any faith typically experience a child’s conversion as a painful rejection of the family unit. But when someone is drawn to this choice, the experience is often so powerful and mystical that it can be difficult to assign the label of rebellion. When a young adult turns away from the religious faith in which they are raised, is this a spiritual calling? Or a radical rebellion?

Stephen Dubner’s bestselling book, Turbulent Souls, explores the author’s search to understand his Jewish parents’ choice to convert to Catholicism before his birth. Raised as a devout altar boy, Dubner is surprised when he begins college and many people he meets assume that he is Jewish. Growing up, Dubner did not know any Jewish people in the rural farming community in which he was raised. While as a young child he possessed a vague understanding that his parents “used to be Jewish,” his understanding of Judaism was so limited that he also thought that Jewish people had horns.

One of the many unusual twists in Dubner’s story is that both of his parents were raised in observant Jewish homes in New York. Florence was raised in Brooklyn and found herself called to the church while visiting a service with her dance instructor in Manhattan. Like Florence, Sol was raised by immigrant parents in New York. He lost his mother at age fifteen and struggled with a rejecting father. He wandered into a Manhattan church after returning from military service in World War II. Florence and Sol were both in the process of converting when they locked eyes in church, fell in love, decided to change their names to Veronica and Paul and begin an observant Catholic life in the remote countryside.

The more deeply Dubner digs into his parents’ collective past, the more profoundly he finds himself drawn toward Judaism. Dubner writes movingly about faith, family, mysticism and love:

Was it love that inspired my return to Judaism? No, I told myself, not love. It was something smaller than love, less desperate. It was instinct. My noisy soul had demanded that I follow the flow of my blood.

But that flow, of course, had now led to my father. I had never been brave enough to consider what his death had truly done to me. Perhaps it had damaged me as much as his mother’s death had damaged him.

Turbulent Souls does not place one faith above another. It digs deep into divergent views and conflicting directions. The relationships are animated through honest conversations about faith and the characters come alive through the embrace of their respective paths.

Readers may recognize Stephen Dubner as the author of Freakonomics.