The Beauty in Breaking
A Memoir
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- €8.49
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A 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 more
An 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compassionate memoir, Harper, an African-American ER physician, reflects upon her career, sharing stories that take the reader "into the chaos of emergency medicine." Growing up as a member of Washington, D.C.'s "black elite," Harper, whose father was also a physician, lived with the dark secret of his domestic abuse, her days "routinely punctuated by bursts of violence." When her brother John's hand is injured in a fight with their father, she takes him to the ER. Seeing the ER, a place "so quiet and yet so throbbing with life," inspires her to become a doctor. Upon graduating from Harvard, Harper lives and works in New York City with her husband (also a Harvard grad), but when she accepts her first post-residency in Philadelphia, the marriage dissolves when her independent filmmaker husband declares that he needs to focus on his career and "find himself." While devastating, the divorce allowed her to immerse herself in her position as the director of performance improvement in the ER. Taking on the painful topics of trauma, domestic abuse, and the "ubiquitous microaggressions faced by people of color," especially in the medical profession, Harper seeks to understand the human condition and persistent societal issues that impact care in urban hospitals. Harper witnesses the resilience of the human spirit of her patients and begins her own process of self-healing through yoga and meditation. This powerful story will resonate with readers, especially physicians.
