the beauty in breaking a memoir by michele harper

Brought up in Washington, DC, in an abusive 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. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.īlue Nights-the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”-like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.Īn emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood-in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.īlue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.

The beauty in breaking a memoir by michele harper