Review by Booklist Review
In this collection of funny, touching, and self-deprecating essays, physician Koven covers extensive ground: being a doctor's daughter, becoming a doctor and a mom, dealing with family health issues, experiencing sexism in her profession, and coping with the impostor syndrome. It's easy to root for likable, modest Koven, who, despite all her accomplishments--majoring in English literature at Yale, going to medical school at Johns Hopkins, joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School--worries about things like her weight and her natural chattiness. She loves listening to the people she treats. "I find my patients much more interesting than their diseases." On the job during the AIDS epidemic and now facing the COVID-19 pandemic, Koven declares that the day she graduated from medical school was the happiest day of her life. Her mom told her, "Don't waste your life." This thought-provoking and inspiring memoir, which began as a series of letters to a friend and an avidly read 2017 essay with the same title in the New England Journalism of Medicine, makes it clear she heeds that good advice.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Physician Koven expands her New England Journal of Medicine essay, which chronicled her struggle with imposter syndrome, into a vulnerable if often frustrating memoir of a life and career spent continually questioning her place and abilities. Her doubts formed from childhood; her mother started law school "after years as a housewife" when Koven was a teenager, and quizzed her daughter on legal dilemmas but also passed down her obsession with dieting. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon, but he "didn't encourage... nor discourage" Koven's medical ambitions. Perceived missteps and failures weighed heavily on Koven's recollections of med school and her entry into the field when she joined Harvard Medical. ("I don't understand the pancreas!" she wails to her husband.) She worried that she might "kill someone" or just "look foolish," and blamed herself for not diagnosing her own mother's heart attack. She calls out sexism--when appointed chief resident at John Hopkins, she gets called the "token woman"--but also recounts moments of connection, such as hugging a belligerent dying patient who had been labeled a "pain" on the ward, but as Koven writes, the woman was "her pain." The insidious nature of insecurity in women's professional identities is on full display here, and will land as painfully familiar for many readers. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Graceful reflections on being a female doctor by a longtime primary care physician. Koven, a Harvard Medical School faculty member and writer-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital, builds on the tradition of Richard Selzer's Letters to a Young Doctor in a collection of personal essays, some published in the New England Journal of Medicine. As a medical student, the author learned that a senior doctor saw her presence on a urology rotation as "pointless" because "no self-respecting man would go to a lady urologist," and sexism persists in her profession: Female physicians earn $20,000 per year less than their male peers, hold fewer leadership positions, and face sexual harassment ranging from "bro" humor in operating rooms to abuse severe enough to cause some women to switch careers. Yet this book is no rant against a field Koven clearly enjoys. Writing without rancor and with self-deprecating humor, the author debunks myths (it's untrue that nurses dislike female doctors--"nurses were, in fact, especially supportive of us new women MDs") and suggests how she has avoided such perils as burnout (she began working part time when her children were young and didn't expand her practice as they grew). She also ably describes how her work affected her care for her parents and her childbearing years (she spent part of her first pregnancy at home with preeclampsia, "my dangerously high blood pressure no doubt caused by my long work hours") and why she volunteered to help in a Covid-19 clinic. Less effectively, she argues that a female doctor faces an obstacle "more insidious" than sexism: the fear that she's a fraud, or "imposter syndrome," a pop-psych term that may strike some readers as glib or anti-feminist in its implication that self-doubt could be worse than sexual abuse or being denied raises or promotions. Nonetheless, Koven's down-to-earth message is likely to win over skeptics, as she learned "that I can only be who I am. And that this is OK." A fine graduation present for a newly minted female M.D. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
