The Beauty in Breaking

Harper opens with her graduation from her emergency medicine residency at Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx. Her mother was her only guest. Harper’s husband, Dan, did not attend, a visible sign that her marriage to Dan had ended. She writes, “It wasn’t at all how I had pictured graduation from my emergency medicine residency at Mercy Hospital […] but it certainly was a blistering end” (21). In the months leading up to the end of her residency, Harper and Dan planned to move to Philadelphia, where Dan’s parents lived. However, as the time to move approached, Dan shocked Harper when he told her that he would not be moving with her. He justified this decision by saying that he could not live in the shadow of her professional success. Two days later, Harper filed for divorce. She writes, “I wasn’t angry the marriage was over. I wasn’t bitter. I knew that we had run our course” (27). As her marriage ended, she reflected on why she was so hurt by the divorce and concluded that the wounds from her past were the actual source of her grief.

After briefly summarizing her academic trajectory, which notably included Harvard (where she met Dan), Harper details her internship, which she describes as a dreadful year in virtually every doctor’s experience. During her internship, she was overseen by a strict, ruthless doctor named Dr. Jaiswal, who was notoriously harsh in her criticism and stingy with praise. Harper recalls an experience with Dr. Jaiswal in which Harper fumbled in an explanation of a patient’s circumstances, an experience that was both embarrassing and formative—never again would she make a similar mistake. Harper then returns the narrative to her graduation from residency, the momentous and symbolic rite of passage that would lead her into her life as both a fully licensed doctor and a recently divorced single woman.