Ginny Elkin is a young, promising writer with mental health issues. At times, she has been described by psychiatrists as "schizoid... with borderline psychotic cognitive processes." Having tried various therapies, she ultimately begins individual psychotherapy with Irvin D. Yalom at the outpatient clinics of Stanford University.

"Every Day a Little Closer" is the product of their therapeutic contract, in which they agreed to separately document their impressions and feelings from each session. Within the pages of the book, the therapist-therapized relationship unfolds for the first time without any fictionalization. The only fictional element is the name of the patient, as it was necessary to obscure her identity for medical confidentiality reasons.

In this exchange of notes, which resembles an epistolary novel, we follow the thirty-nine-year-old Yalom and his twenty-year-old patient as they struggle to establish a relationship of intimacy and trust that will significantly contribute to healing. But the greatest magic that ever entered my life is not the words; it is the true feelings and real actions, such as crying and thrashing. I get lost in speaking.

I sat like clay in that armchair pretending to have emotions and form. Ginny seems to bring her own gray setting and skillfully sets it up in the first minutes of the hour. Very soon, I find myself entangled in the drama. I feel the world as she feels it: a strange, bizarre, circular melancholy. I begin to share the same despair.

Dr. Yalom: "Inside, however, I wondered whether the descriptions of the therapy sessions would indeed constitute a publishable literary work, with two very distinct characters and two recognizable literary styles, somewhat like an epistolary novel. [...] Following the suggestion of several readers who found the manuscript difficult to approach without some explanatory material, as well as some who wanted to know what happened to Ginny after therapy, Dr. Yalom and Ginny also wrote a Foreword and an Epilogue each a year and a half after their last therapy session.

These notes do indeed add significant information and explanations on both a personal and theoretical level. Nevertheless, I still believe that the core piece can be read as a novel, as a story of two people who met in the intimacy of psychiatric one-on-one and now allow us to know them as they got to know each other."

From the foreword by Marilyn Yalom