I Can't Save You
A Memoir
-
-
3.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
The raw and gripping memoir of a Black physician who confronts his past mistakes and relationships as he learns to find his own path forward
At first glance, Anthony Chin-Quee looks like a traditional success story: a smart, ambitious kid who grew up to become a board-certified otolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Yet the truth is more complicated.
As a self-described “not white, mostly Black, and questionably Asian man,” Chin-Quee knows that he doesn’t fit easily into any category. Growing up in a family with a background of depression, he struggled with relationships, feelings of inadequacy, and a fear of failure that made it difficult for him to forge lasting bonds with others.
To repair that, he began his own unflinching examination of what it means to be both a physician and a Black man today. What saved him and his sanity was not medicine but storytelling: by sharing stories from his life and career, Chin-Quee learned how powerful the truth can be in helping to forgive yourself and others as you chart a new way forward.
By turns harrowing and hilarious, honest and human, I Can’t Save You is the fascinating true story of how looking within can change you and your life for the better.
Contents
Prologue 1
ONE: Chin-Quee, M.D. 3
TWO: A-Side—Success* 42
THREE: B-Side—The Fall 80
FOUR: You 160
FIVE: Fear of Flying 176
SIX: Rainbow Connection 212
SEVEN: Y'ain't (k)no(w) 222
EIGHT: Fatherhood 285
NINE: Eulogy 334
Acknowledgments 353
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scattered debut, surgeon Chin-Quee catalogs his tumultuous path to becoming a doctor. Growing up in Brooklyn as an only child of West Indian immigrants, Chin-Quee was encouraged to pursue a steady career path from an early age. After medical school, he began his residency at a Detroit hospital, and he relays the mental and physical tolls of that experience in harrowing anecdotes about his first patient death, a night out with coworkers that ended with Chin-Quee jumping into a broken elevator to rescue a passed-out friend, and his fraught relationship with Waldo, a younger resident he struggled to mentor. Throughout the residency, Chin-Quee was seized by fears that his career and personal relationships would fall apart, and he attempts to capture that instability with a series of stylistic flourishes, including poems, a potential suicide note, and a screenplay that documents racial microaggressions he's endured. Though they're inventive, many of these exercises fall flat, neither entertaining nor affecting enough to make an impression. Some late passages about Chin-Quee's father are moving and illuminating, however. It's a valiant effort, but it doesn't stand out on the crowded shelf of medical memoirs.
Customer Reviews
Hard truths, needed realization and sharing
In this book Chin-Quee’s done many of the hard things in life most are incapable of. Analyzing parents and finding new and different paths forward is one of the hardest. Many people never achieve it. But for a better and different world, it will be required. Love IS the key, so glad he ‘mostly’ found it. Love of self, of others, of goodwill.
It does sadden me when people of color feel the only way forward is to create ‘caramel kids’. That the thought doesn’t compute, you would erase yourself and your race to get peace, not hold the race you’re partnering with accountable for correcting their behavior, is astounding. When we want what we want we do cognitive dissonance so very well.