How to watch ER doctor Michele Harper discuss ‘The Beauty in Breaking’

Bestselling author and emergency room physician Michele Harper joined the L.A. Times Book Club June 29 to discuss “The Beauty in Breaking” with reporter Marissa Evans.

You can watch the conversation on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

Harper’s debut book is a memoir that takes readers inside the emotionally charged, adrenaline-stoked landscape of an urban ER, and shows how Harper’s own troubled childhood growing up in Washington, D.C., led her there.

Michele Harper at the L.A. Times Book Club with reporter Marissa Evans.

(Los Angeles Times)

Told with compassion and urgency, the narrative is rooted in her interactions with patients. “The Beauty in Breaking,” the book club’s June selection, debuted last summer during the height of the coronavirus crisis and landed on the New York Times Bestseller List.

In a recent interview, Harper talked about how she rediscovered her love of her writing after more than a decade working as an emergency physician.

“When I was in high school, I would write poetry,” she says. “Then I started the medical path, and it beat the words out of me.”

The Times featured “The Beauty in Breaking” in the final installment of the United We Read series, Heather John Fogarty’s yearlong reading journey through every U.S. state during the pandemic. Here’s the full reading list from Alabama to Wyoming, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

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