A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA New York Times Notable Book“Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review“An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and moreAn emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.\
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.\
In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.\
The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.\
Amazon.com Review\
When Michele Harper was in her teens, she got her first taste of the emergency room: “I marveled at the place, one of bright lights and dark hallways, a place so quiet and yet so throbbing with life.” She wasn’t there for an innocent childhood fall, but because her father had physically abused her brother, again. Growing up in Washington, DC, as part of the “Black elite,” Harper and her family never spoke about her father’s violence and the searing scars it left. Yet it was that visit to the emergency room that crystalized her desire to heal and pursue medicine—“if my brother’s body could be patched up, then certainly, in its own time, his spirit could mend, too.”
The Beauty in Breaking is Dr. Harper’s story of breaks and fixes, of healing emotionally and physically. She recounts the fears of her childhood and how those same feelings of brokenness and abandonment returned when her husband left her, and how she copes as a Black female doctor. From tending to babies who were no longer breathing, to a boy who was beat up at school and vows to retaliate with a gun (the only way he knows how), to patients who have a history of sexual abuse, Dr. Harper vividly recounts what the ER is like at 3:30 in the morning. She peppers her memories with her own reflections on the racism and sexism that permeate the field of medicine and our country and what it is like to grieve and rebuild from a traumatic event, whether a cracked rib, a horrible father, or the babies she never had with her husband. Dr. Harper is determined to heal, but also to take the time necessary to understand the pain, in a page-turning memoir of hurt, diagnosis, and recovery.
—Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review

Categories:

• Medical Books
  
  
  • Medicine
    
    
    • Internal Medicine
      • Emergency