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A review by neptuneisblue
Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom
1.0
I’ve read lots of Yalom’s books and love many of them. When Nietzsche Wept is one of my all time favourite fiction books, so I was excited to give this a try. Gah! I really disliked it!
The characters were all pretty unlikeable, and with many of them I felt I just didn’t need to know such a long back story about them. There was a lot of inner-head dialogue that I had to just skip through. I’ve just finished his autobiography so I noticed quite a lot of the subplots were things in real life that had happened to him, which again I found a bit annoying as it would happen to different characters, not even just that one of them that was based on himself. But the absolute worst part about this book was the way women were written. “Birds, broads and an “enormous-bosomed Swede”. Just a few ways women were described. So many “this is a woman written by a man” moments. Yikes. So I had to rage read it.
The characters were all pretty unlikeable, and with many of them I felt I just didn’t need to know such a long back story about them. There was a lot of inner-head dialogue that I had to just skip through. I’ve just finished his autobiography so I noticed quite a lot of the subplots were things in real life that had happened to him, which again I found a bit annoying as it would happen to different characters, not even just that one of them that was based on himself. But the absolute worst part about this book was the way women were written. “Birds, broads and an “enormous-bosomed Swede”. Just a few ways women were described. So many “this is a woman written by a man” moments. Yikes. So I had to rage read it.