In his long and distinguished career, Irvin D. Yalom has pressed his patients and readers to grapple with life’s two greatest challenges: that we all must die, and that each of us is responsible for leading a life worth living.

In Creatures of a Day, he and his patients confront the difficulty of meeting these challenges. Yalom not only gives us an enthralling glimpse into his patients’ desires and motivations, but also tells his own story as he struggles to reconcile his emotional life with the demands placed on him, and reckons with his own life’s inevitable end.

Creatures of a Day shows that the process of psychotherapy can create some of the most engrossing human dramas imaginable. It provides an intelligent, compassionate, and yet unflinching look at the human soul and all the pain, confusion, and hope that go with it. Suffused with humour, great artistry, and a profound humanity, Creatures of a Day lays bare the necessary task we each face, each day, to make our own lives meaningful.

PRAISE FOR IRVIN D. YALOM

‘A poignant and bracing collection of stories based on [Yalom’s] therapeutic work. Yalom, a published novelist with decades of clinical experience, offers vivid and generous descriptions of patients brought face-to-face with their mortality … Watching “Irv”, as his patients call him, convince patients to unpack their baggage is the chief pleasure of this book. He is overtly kind, sympathetic, and generous, but subtly merciless.’ The Los Angeles Times

‘Creatures of a Day is a series of moving, if partly fictionalized, tales illuminating Yalom’s hand-crafted approach to treating grief, loss, regret and, above all, encroaching mortality … [Yalom] is a student of the human condition whose literary, as well as therapeutic, voice mixes wonder and humility.’ The Boston Globe