Medical dramas tend to earn the skepticism of real medical professionals like Michele Harper, an emergency room doctor and the author of The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir: "No, the ER staffs are not Hollywood beautiful--you won't find us in the pages of Vogue or GQ, and we're not all sleeping with one another (I've worked in only one hospital like that)." But readers of The Beauty in Breaking can be forgiven for registering some of the pleasures derived from watching Grey's Anatomy and its kin: good storytelling, memorable characters, shocking outcomes, unexpected uplift and satisfying blasts of righteous indignation.
The Beauty in Breaking's case-study-like chapters are devoted to patients whose stories spur Harper to draw connections between her work and the larger world. In "Dominic: Body of Evidence," the police haul in a black man for allegedly swallowing bags of drugs and expect Harper, who is African American, to give him a physical exam without his consent, which she knows is against the law absent a court order; for Harper, this disregard for the man's rights recalls the despicable historical practice of performing medical experiments on nonconsenting black men. In "Jeremiah: Cradle and All," Harper treats a 13-year-old who has come in with a head trauma--the upshot of a classmate's bullying. After the boy confesses that he owns a gun and intends to use it on his assailant, Harper is required to contact social services. As she awaits the social worker, she wonders "why, in all my growing-up years, no physician had ever spoken to me alone, to ask if I was safe."
It's a reference to her fraught childhood. Harper grew up middle class in Washington, D.C., with a physician father who beat her mother. "The job of my youth had been to get out of that house and out of that life," Harper writes. She succeeded, although the celebratory mood of her graduation from an emergency medicine residency was dulled by the coinciding collapse of her marriage.
Harper alone followed through on what had been the couple's plan to move to Philadelphia. By the end of The Beauty in Breaking, fortified by yoga and meditation and the conviction that healing works both ways, Harper has found a restless peace working at a Philly VA hospital, where the beguiled reader hopes that she will continue to gather insights and commit them to the page. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: 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.