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. #ShopIndie and purchase a first edition of Harper's book at Midtown Scholar Boo.
A Memoir
Michele Harper Bio
- A New York Times Bestseller
- TIME Recommended Best New Book to Read in July 2020
- Lululemon August Book Club Pick & Gold Foundation Summer Reads Book Pick
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. After taking her first breath in NYC, she was 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.
Praise for The Beauty in Breaking
“[THE BEAUTY IN BREAKING is a] riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring story … Just as Harper would never show up to examine a patient without her stethoscope, the reader should not open this book without a pen in hand. There are so many powerful beats you’ll want to underline.” — Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times Book Review
Box net mac. “A moving, beautifully written memoir.” — New York Post
“[A] wise and elegant debut memoir.” — Boston Globe
The Beauty In Breaking By Michele Harper
“A book for our times, Harper’s debut is a compelling memoir about her life as a Black woman emergency room doctor and how that work overlaps with the complexities of life. Harper explores hurt and healing, race and gender, justice and hope with candor and compassion.” — Ms. Magazine
“This powerful story will resonate with readers.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Tackling such painful subjects as domestic abuse, trauma, and racism with grace and wisdom, this eloquent book probes the human condition as it chronicles a woman’s ever evolving spiritual journey … A profoundly humane memoir from a thoughtful doctor.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Harper’s words inspire hope and understanding of the importance of peace and acceptance of the past. Poignant, helpful, and encouraging, Harper’s lessons from life in and outside of the emergency room ultimately teach readers how to trust the healing process.”
—Library Journal
“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
The Beauty In Breaking By Michele Harper
“The Beauty in Breaking is a compelling page-turner about how Dr. Michele Harper took a broken childhood and wove herself into a strong, honest, compassionate doctor. A must read.”
—Louann Brizendine, M.D., author of The Female Brain
“The Beauty in Breaking takes us into the life in an Emergency Room — the drama, the adrenaline, the emotion — with such immediacy that I could not help but be completely enthralled by the individual stories of the patients that Michele Harper treats. But this powerful, poignant page-turner of a book also tells a much larger and universal story about how healing actually happens, not just for broken bodies but for broken hearts and souls. In sharing the stories of her patients and her own life, Harper shows us that healing begins only after we are broken open ourselves. And she shows us with hopeful, heartbreaking clarity that it comes from healing each other.”
—Kerry Egan, author of On Living