Upon graduating from Harvard, Harper lives and works in New York City with her husband (also a Harvard grad), but when she accepts her first post-residency in Philadelphia, the marriage dissolves when her independent filmmaker husband declares that he needs to focus on his career and “find himself.” While devastating, the divorce allowed her to immerse herself in her position as the director of performance improvement in the ER. Seeing the ER, a place “so quiet and yet so throbbing with life,” inspires her to become a doctor.
In this compassionate memoir, Harper, an African-American ER physician, reflects upon her career, sharing stories that take the reader “into the chaos of emergency medicine.” Growing up as a member of Washington, D.C.’s “black elite,” Harper, whose father was also a physician, lived with the dark secret of his domestic abuse, her days “routinely punctuated by bursts of violence.” When her brother John’s hand is injured in a fight with their father, she takes him to the ER.
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