American standards and expectations for what is considered beautiful imposes unrealistic norms upon women. I guess my crisis comes from society’s faulty beauty standards.

All it takes is a couple seconds to start questioning your own self-worth and beauty, and begin wishing you were someone else. First-hand, I know what it’s like to walk down the halls and be intimidated by all these pretty thin girls with long pretty hair and smiles, and immediately feel horrible about yourself. Making my way through middle school and high school with this identity crisis has been tough. I’m not the pretty girl in school, or the smartest kid in the class, or the athlete who takes home all the trophies. 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.Since I was 11, I have struggled with trying to figure out who I am and loving myself. 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.

How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery.

The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. 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. 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. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. 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. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. “An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” -Ellen PompeoĪs seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and moreĪn emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. “Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” - The New York Times Book Review

The beauty in the breaking