2025 IPPY Awards Silver Medalist for Sexuality/Relationships
2025 ZIBBY Most Anticipated Book of 2025
2025 ZIBBY Summer Reads Selection

For fans of Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a contemporary memoir by a psychologist whose sexual conflict with her screenwriter husband threatens to destroy her marriage.

Can a loving relationship endure career setbacks, infidelities, and mismatched sexual desires? This is the question psychologist Bonnie Comfort grapples with as she navigates her unpredictable thirty-year marriage to Hollywood screenwriter Bob, while she provides marital therapy to others.

Bob is affectionate, brilliant, and hilarious—but his sexual desires are incompatible with Bonnie's. Despite her misgivings, she indulges his kinks, which often include photographing her in lingerie. Their Hollywood life is exciting, but eventually Bob's growing career frustrations lead to his complete sexual shutdown. Tensions rise, and Bob suggests Bonnie have discreet affairs and not tell him. She does just that—but when she confesses her infidelities five years later, his sexual demands become more extreme. When she complies, Bonnie feels shame; when she refuses, as she increasingly does, their fights threaten to tear their marriage apart.

Bonnie understands the rhythm of disconnection and repair that is common in love relationships. With honesty and vulnerability, she recounts the highs and lows of her own marriage which sadly ends with Bob's death. As she grieves, Bonnie reflects on her role in their marital struggles and offers profound insights from personal and professional experience. Her story lays bare the complexities of love, the ongoing challenges women face in intimate relationships, and how even difficult marriages can find a way to thrive.

During the winter rains here in Portland, Oregon, there are times when my office smells of faint cologne, baking chocolate from St. Cupcake downstairs, incessant coffee, and wet fleece and leather. At the end of a day of doing psychotherapy, my trash can is crowded with tear-soaked Kleenex and used Starbucks paper cups. The room feels full of a palpable desperation from my patients who want their lives to get better. There are laughs and lighthearted moments too, but it’s the sadness that stays with me, the painful stories of abandonment or conflict.

Married couples stress me the most with their raised voices, anxious sweat, and tired, angry faces because they don’t know how to turn their complaints into something constructive that might stop the bickering at home. Couples worry about their children, their finances, and their self-destructive late-night habits of hidden cookies, another glass of wine, or clandestine watching of porn in the bathroom. Spouses hide and withdraw from each other, and when they start to tell the truth in my office their conversations are full of blame, hurt and sarcasm.

At the end of such a workday I’m worn out by the human longing to be understood, rescued, forgiven, cherished, loved, soothed, and to feel hopeful again.

One evening at home after a marital therapy day like this, I peeled off my clothes in the bedroom, grateful to let go of all the sadness and frustration I’d witnessed that day, glad to push away the constant hum of need piled up in those Starbucks cups and Kleenex. I sat down on the edge of my bed and glanced at a framed photograph of me taken by my husband, Bob. Although I’d walked by it a thousand times and barely noticed it on the wall, this time the waning light illuminated it at an angle that caught my eye. I picked it up off its hook and sat down on the bed to study it. Although we were only a few years into our marriage when this photograph was taken, Bob had already shot thousands of photographs of me using his Canon AE-1 SLR. That camera was his single most important possession, and I was his favorite subject.

I angled the photograph to the light and noted I was wearing a dress that had been a favorite of mine back then, a filmy black chiffon blouson with tiny red flowers scattered over it. I was perched on the kitchen counter in our long-ago Pacific Palisades house, next to a hot air popcorn maker and a beehive glass honey jar. In this photo, one of my knees is up, that foot resting on a chair, my elbow on that knee, my hand propping up my chin. There is a slight spread between my perched leg and the other one, enough that you get a glimpse of black stocking and garter. Wide-open love shows in my eyes as I look at Bob. My face is wistful and vulnerable.

That photo was taken decades ago. I ran my fingers over the framed glass and then stopped, resting on the image. I was young. I was trusting. I was in love with my husband and eager to please him. I didn’t know then that my need to please him would lead somewhere darker.

No matter how great a marriage is, there’s always a shadow side. I was a psychologist doing marital therapy, but my patients might have been surprised at how deep the shadow side was in own marriage. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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