Book Club
The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
A Memooir
An ER physician’s powerful memoir of how she found healing though empathy.
A Struggle to Achieve
While there are many books by doctors about their most interesting case histories, few tell us how those physicians feel when they’re home alone.
Author Michele Harper is an emergency physician who’s worked at some of the East Coast’s toughest and most demanding institutions. She’s won several awards, including the 2022 Gold Foundation Award for Humanism in Medicine.
Her bestselling 2020 memoir, The Beauty of Breaking, is in some ways a collection of short stories, beginning with her own. We learn about her upbringing as the daughter of a doctor in a middle-class Black suburb, a life that was far more turbulent and abusive than others saw.
Harper retraces her steps as an undergraduate at Harvard and on to medical school, and a marriage that abruptly ended just two months before she began her hospital residency. Harper describes the racial bias she’s experienced in hiring, the violence she sometimes faces at work, and the struggles of being a Black woman in a healthcare system that sometimes seems determined to break her.
Finding Self-Healing
Harper says she originally chose emergency medicine because it seemed to offer a sense of control, and a way of “providing relief or at least a reprieve to those who called out for help.”
Ultimately, she found that exterior chaos forced her to examine her interior life and cultivate inner strength. However, she says it was only after she recognized and accepted the way she herself is broken that she was able to heal herself and help others find their own strength.
Although she had probably seen thousands of patients by the time The Beauty of Breaking was written, Harper concentrates on just a few, taking the time to give a sense of each patient as a person, as well as the ways they affected each other’s lives.
“Brokenness can be a remarkable gift,” Harper says in her final chapter. “By healing ourselves, we heal each other.” To this, I can only add, “Amen.”
The Beauty in Breaking is for every healthcare worker who wants to remember why we do the hard work that we do.
The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper (Riverhead Books, 2020)
CHRISTINE CONTILLO, RN, BSN, PHN, is a public health nurse with more than 40 years of experience, ranging from infants to geriatrics.
In this Article: Emergency, Stress and Burnout
