Michele Harper

Harper is an emergency physician who grew up in a violent household in Washington, and The Beauty in Breaking sets that childhood against the patients she has treated in emergency rooms in the South Bronx, in Philadelphia and at a veterans' hospital. Her husband told her he would not be moving with her two months before she was due to start the Philadelphia job, and the book opens in that gap. It reached print in 2020, when the emergency room had become the most watched room in the country.