The Beauty In Breaking: A Memoir by Dr. Michele Harper
(Format used for this read: Print–Hard back)
In case yall have been wondering:
Yes I DO still read books written for adults.🤣
While I love me some YA and I have really needed a lot of it in my life these days (as yall have seen by all my latest reviews!), I also do need to ensure I have some age appropriate reads on my night stand too.
I have to make sure I hold on to my Grown Up membership card😄
(I am fairly certain I am always on the edge of having it revoked anyway.)
I want to make sure I continue in my listening to and learning from people with life experiences different than my own.
Which is why reading memoirs is another favorite genre of mine.
I came across this title as one of my Book Of The Month picks a few months ago and knew it would be a great addition to my shelf…and would likely be one I would pass along to others after finishing.
Here is the official summary:
“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.”
Here is a fact about me:
I do not enjoy medical things….AT ALL. I am squeamish of all bodily fluids and medical procedures…I do NOT want to BE in any part of them and I do NOT want to SEE any part of them.
But another interesting fact:
I grew up with a mom who was an ER nurse and an older sister who was fascinated by the medical world and is now a Nurse Practitioner.
My mom worked in the same ER for the majority of my younger years…so the medical world that I have no desire to be a part of is intimately intertwined with my childhood memories.
I constantly had to plug my ears at our dinner table because my sister couldn’t WAIT to ask my mom about her most interesting (usually that meant GROSSEST) patient she saw that day.
I will never forget her telling the story of a woman who came in with her own nipple WRAPPED IN A KLEENEX ….which was bitten off by her HORSE.
Yall I swear that is a TRUE STORY that is burned into my memory FOREVER…I will spare you specific details on that but if you’re into knowing these kinda things, I will send you my mom’s contact info. She will fill you in on this one…and will likely have a BUNCH more. My big sister now has her OWN interesting stories to share too…so I can pass you her info as well. 😁
I still to this day hate fireworks you can do at home and also have never ridden (or plan to ever ride) a motorcycle because of the horrific stories I repeatedly heard while trying to eat my lima beans.
What I also heard and saw though was how HARD my mom worked as a nurse…and how much she really loved what she did and how much she cared for her patients and co workers.
And now I hear and see the same type of things from my sister as well as my many friends who are in the same careers.
So…even though I do not want ANYTHING to do with a medical profession myself….I have a VERY strong respect and admiration for them.
I am not fascinated by medical things ONE BIT…but I AM fascinated by the people who are.
From what I have seen in my family members and friends in these professions (and also in my own experience as a patient), the people who are truly GOOD at their medical jobs are the ones that are there because they want to do all they can to help HEAL others….their hearts are driven by compassion and love…..they don’t just see a body they can cure or fix in their patients, they see a PERSON they can help and heal and care for.
The author of this book is EXACTLY that kind of person.
This book is a story not only of her patients and their healing, but also of her own life and how SHE heals as well.
She intertwines her patient’s stories and her professional journey with her own personal experiences…..how she has helped others overcome and how doing that helped her to overcome as well.
She speaks about her experiences with childhood trauma, a broken marriage, gender inequality, racism, and grappling with self identity and life purpose.
She is a TRUE healer in every sense of the word.
While I think Dr Harper is a freaking AMAZING woman and doctor, what I did not find her to be is a stand out writer.
Some of her writing is kinda choppy and disjointed…the transitions from one time period to the next or one story to the next are NOT smooth ones.
But that does not take away from the power of her words or her experiences that she shares in the pages.
I would say it just bumps it down from a 5 out of 5 star rating to a 4 star one.
One more teensy thing I didn’t love…there IS a lot of medical speak…just a TAD more than I personally enjoy….so I think if you’re into that kinda thing OR you are also a medical professional, you will TOTALLY be down with it.
But I mean…this is a memoir and she IS a doctor…so of COURSE there should be alot of medical speak I guess.
(another interesting fact about me: even though I do not like medical things, I was a huge fan of the shows “ER” and “House” for yearrrrs 🤷♀️ What can I say…I was there for the PEOPLE not what was happening to the patients)
Something I really appreciate about Dr Harper that she discusses are her views on holistic healthcare.
While she is a doctor of Western medicine, she also believes in using other types of healing practices as well, such as accupuncture. She believes in a complementary medical approach which I really like.
I wish we had more doctors like her.
And hopefully her book will encourage others to follow her lead.