If you are looking for inspirational nonfiction, The Beauty In Breaking by Michele Harper is one of my favorite memoir books of 2020. I loved learning more about the ER along with Harper’s meditative life messages. There is indeed ‘beauty in breaking.’

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The Beauty In Breaking by Michele Harper
Book Information
Author: Michele Harper
Genre: Nonfiction | Memoir | Emergency Medicine
Pages: 300
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: July 2020
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The Beauty In Breaking by Michele Harper Summary
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.
Riverhead Books
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Read More About Michele Harper
If Michele Harper writes any more books, I will be here for it. Harper has worked as an ER physician for over 10 years, and The Beauty in Breaking is her debut title. Learn more about Michele Harper.
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