“Something heavy is going on … the past is erupting … my two lives, night and day, are joining. I need to talk.”
Summary
At the close of his fiftieth medical school reunion, Irvin Yalom’s oldest friend took him by the arm. In fifty years of friendship, the heart surgeon Robert Berger had never spoken of his nocturnal terrors. Now a chance encounter had cracked something open, and he could not stay silent.
Berger survived the Holocaust in Hungary by passing as a Christian. The decades afterwards were built on expiation and repression — a distinguished surgical career laid over a sealed past. When that seal broke, the two friends sat down together to interpret the fragments: the dreams, the phrase that gave the book its title, the memories that had been waiting half a century for a listener.
The result is a short, unusual book — part case study, part memoir of a friendship, part record of what happens when a therapist’s oldest ally becomes, for a while, the person who needs him.
Why read it
It is the most personal of Yalom’s non-fiction: no composite patients, no clinical distance, just two men in their seventies doing the work. Readers who valued the intimacy of Love’s Executioner and the late honesty of Creatures of a Day will recognise the register immediately.
Read an excerpt → · See also the best therapy memoirs and books about being a therapist.
Endorsements
La Croix
“The American psychiatrist and writer Irvin Yalom expresses once again his unbelievable sense of narration. His blazing story marvellously restores that particular moment when the past suddenly resurfaces — when the friend you thought you knew begins to speak.”
Le Monde des Livres
“Those who devoured Love’s Executioner, Staring at the Sun or Lying on the Couch may be surprised by this latest, very classical story … built on a drama buried for half a century, with the extermination of Hungary’s Jews at its epicentre. There is redemption at the end of the road.”