Beauty in Breaking (Harper)

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir
Michele Harper, 2020
Penguin Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525537380


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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia.

She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.
New York Times Book Review


(Starred review) Taking on the painful topics of trauma, domestic abuse, and the "ubiquitous microaggressions faced by people of color," Harper… begins her own process of self-healing…. This powerful story will resonate with readers.
Publishers Weekly


Harper’s words inspire hope and understanding of the importance of peace and acceptance of the past. Poignant, helpful, and encouraging, [her] lessons… from life in… the emergency room ultimately teach readers how to trust the healing process. —Rich McIntyre Jr., UConn Health Sciences Lib., Farmington
Library Journal


An African American emergency room physician reflects on how "the chaos of emergency medicine" helped her… understand the true nature of healing.… [T]his eloquent book… chronicles a woman’s ever evolving spiritual journey. A profoundly humane memoir from a thoughtful doctor.
Kirkus Reviews


In this illuminating memoir, an African American emergency room doctor finds that her patients' stories lead her to make connections between her work and the larger world.
Shelf Awareness

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion of THE BEAUTY IN BREAKING … then take off on your own:

1. "If my brother’s body could be patched up, then certainly, in its own time, his spirit could mend, too." Talk about the ways in which this passage, young Michele Harper's musing about her brother's presence in the ER stands as the thematic concern of this work. How is it possible for physical healing lead to spiritual/emotional healing?

2. How did Harper's observations of her patients and their struggles teach her about human brokenness and resilience. Take her patients, one-by-one, and talk about their personal struggles and what Harper learned from them.

3. Harper is a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white profession. Talk about the roll that racism plays in Harper's own life and for the patients of color who enter the hospital's ER.

4. Harper realizes that "America bears… many layers of racial wounds, both chronic and acute." What specifically does she mean, and in what way does this realization inspire her?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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