Ginny Elkin is a young promising writer with mental health issues. At times, psychiatrists have described her as "schizoid... with borderline psychotic mental processes." Having tried various treatments, she eventually starts individual psychotherapy with Irvin Yalom at Stanford University's outpatient clinic.

"Every Day Gets a Little Closer" is a product of their therapeutic contract, in which they agreed to separately record their impressions and feelings from each session. The pages of the book unfold for the first time the therapist-client relationship without any fiction. The only fictional element is the name of the client, as it was necessary to conceal her identity for medical confidentiality reasons. In this exchange of notes, which almost resembles an epistolary novel, we watch the thirty-nine-year-old Yalom and his twenty-year-old patient struggle to establish a relationship of intimacy and trust that will crucially contribute to healing.

But the greatest magic that ever entered my life is not words, it is true feelings and true actions, like crying and thrashing about. I get lost in talking. [...] I sat like clay in that armchair pretending to have feelings and shape.

Ginny

It's as if she brings her own gray backdrop and sets it up very skillfully within the first minutes of the hour. Very soon, I am entangled in the drama. I feel the world as she feels it: a strange, bizarre, cyclical melancholy. I begin to share the same despair.
Dr. Yalom

"Inside, however, I wondered if indeed the descriptions of the therapeutic sessions would constitute a publishable literary work, with two very distinct characters and two recognizable literary styles, somewhat like an epistolary novel. [...] Following the suggestion of some readers who found the manuscript difficult to approach without some explanatory material, and some who wanted to know what happened to Ginny after the psychotherapy, Dr. Yalom and Ginny each wrote a Foreword and an Epilogue a year and a half after their last therapeutic session. These notes indeed add significant information and explanations on both a personal and theoretical level."

"Nevertheless, I still believe that the central part can be read like a novel, like a story of two people who met in the intimacy of the psychiatric tête-à-tête and now allow us to know them as they knew each other."

From the foreword by Marilyn Yalom