Michele Harper

Michele Harper is an emergency room doctor, and in this memoir she talks about her own life (including her abusive childhood and the problems of sexism and racism that she has faced), about treating her patients, about her views on medicine and spirituality, and about all the ways she's seen the US medical system and other institutions fail people, especially people of color.

I'm finding this a hard one to review, because, man, I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. Or, really, to like it show more at all. Dr. Harper is someone who's endured a lot, who's accomplished a lot, and who is clearly a very caring and committed doctor, and one who isn't afraid to admit to her mistakes, all of which I respect. (Although, I have to say, I find it rather dismaying that she comes down as an advocate for the pseudoscience of "complementary medicine," which she thoroughly conflates with uncontroversial healthy lifestyle choices.) And I do applaud her for the way she so forthrightly says some things that I think very much need to be said and listened to when it comes to the ways in which the institutions that are supposed to help keep us all healthy, safe, and supported fail to do so in depressing and discriminatory ways.

Actually, the chapters where she explicitly does that calling-out of biased and inadequate systems are the best in the book, and I did find them worth reading. But for so much of the rest of it, I found her writing hard to get along with, as it's often stilted and sometimes vaguely purple, and features a lot of her giving compassionate but terribly didactic-for-the-reader lectures to patients. I'm sure a lot of my issues with it have to do with the fact that books that deliberately set out to be inspirational often backfire badly for me, and ones that go on about emotional and/or physical healing as a spiritual process tend to lose me very quickly. But I could tell that this book was just not really going to be for me early on when, in the course of talking about an incredibly sad incident in which Harper and her colleagues tried everything they could to resuscitate a tiny baby who was already beyond saving and then had to inform the family of what happened, she started going on about the spirits of sweet departed cherubs whispering their last words into their parents' ears and giving them butterfly kisses, and... I'm sorry. I can't. I just can't. I know Dr. Harper's heart is absolutely in the right place, and I can't even imagine what it's like to have experiences like that as part of your normal work day, but I read lines like that and I can't help seeing it as human tragedy turned into a sappy Hallmark card, and my brain just kind of shuts down. show less

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir, Michele Harper, author; Nicole Lewis, narrator
In spite of efforts to thwart her desire to heal, to rise up the ranks in the medical profession because she was highly qualified, well trained and filled with the compassion to do a better job than many already in the field, she soldiered on and on, always grasping hope from the mouth of despair. Turned down for a job no one else applied for, a job for which she was perfect, she did not quit, she simply moved on show more to a place she hoped to fare better. She brought her healing hopes to the VA Hospital. She works to aid those less advantaged, people of color, women and men who are underrepresented, prisoners who are not afforded basic civil rights, women who are abused and ignored, women who were refused the same rights that men were happily afforded in some instances, even when roadblocks were placed before her. Michele Harper is the Emergency Room doctor we all hope to find if we are in a traumatic situation that brings us there.
Michele Harper has written a compelling book, in beautiful prose, with clarity and compassion. It is through her eyes that we glimpse the world of those in pain, those who need help in the direst of situations, if not in all eyes, then at least in their own, that is certain. She guides those she can, to better health, calms those who need support, and comforts those who have lost all hope. From the words on the pages of this book, one can only admire this woman who seems largely selfless and without animus toward anyone. Her desire is to heal.
There are moments highlighted, when one learns that she understands, as a woman of color, the plight of those less fortunate, less advantaged, and there are moments when she promotes the ideas of male toxicity and systemic racism with which some readers may not agree, but she uses examples of such injustice to fortify her reasons for these beliefs. They are anecdotal, and they are colored by the opinions of someone who has experienced a large dose of some of the abusive behavior she describes. The readers can draw their own conclusions regarding her philosophy, but they can not dispute the humanity of this woman or her efforts to heal and save all those who come before her with a grace and kindness, a sincere interest and effort to better the world through the influence of love. Her confidence and courage is inspiring. Her efforts area heroic. show less

In this poignant memoir, Michele Harper writes about the abusive household in which she was raised as part of a wealthy African-American family. Her upbringing led her to want to help other people heal. She goes to Harvard for undergraduate work and then attends the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. She marries and divorces before she finishes her final residency and then dedicates her time to being a healer and the most ethical emergency room doctor possible. She show more spends considerable time self-healing and finding balance in her own life, from the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi to yoga and the use of incense. She is always seeking to love herself and be at peace with her own body and spirit as she attends to others.

After the initial narrative about her journey to the world of medicine, each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular patient who made an impression on her. In many cases, she learned lessons from the patient she decided to spotlight. Still, the incidents often reaffirmed what she already knew and provided entertaining and thought-provoking information for the reader. I gained many insights into the world of medicine. I confirmed my beliefs about the sometimes indecipherable differences between physical and mental health that provide continual challenges for the medical profession and society.

I loved Michele Harper’s writing. She communicated passion for her profession and compassion for her patients. She also tackled serious issues such as institutional racism and classism with anecdotes that enhanced my awareness. Michele Harper also qualifies other nuances of inequities inherent in the United States culture. Her beautiful prose gives real-life examples of the microaggressions and blatant racism that people of color face in America’s institutions. I was particularly struck by Lauren, a clueless resident doctor reporting to Dr. Harper, who phoned the hospital’s ethics department because she didn’t believe a Black patient who was under arrest by the police should be allowed to opt out of his treatment.

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I love medical memoirs. I gravitate toward them by default, so when this one showed up on my radar, it was a no-brainer. Harper's story is poignant and at times heartbreaking: exactly what you'd expect from a memoir written by an ER doctor who spends part of her career working for a VA hospital in Philadelphia.

There's also a deeply spiritual bent in Harper's storytelling that I didn't expect but fully appreciated. Her spirituality is non-traditional (she mentions the goddess a handful of show more times), but that's exactly that made it so appealing. I hadn't realized how much it would touch my soul to see my own spiritual beliefs reflected back at me in a mainstream book by a highly-respected doctor.

Although the dialogue was at times stilted and Harper's turns of phrase occasionally awkward and convoluted, there's also so much beauty in this book. In the writing, in the storytelling, and in the deeply human stories of love and loss. show less