COMING FEBRUARY 2025 FROM HARPERCOLLINS

HELD TOGETHER: A SHARED Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and IMPERFECT LOVE

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PHYSICIAN

After more than twenty-five years in my native New England, I got in the car and headed west in 1999 to begin medical school in California. All clichés aside about life being a journey rather than a destination, I arrived in the Bay Area 7541 miles later, having swum in Lake Superior, forded the mighty Mississippi at its diminutive source in Minnesota, stargazed in the Badlands of South Dakota, and spent a birthday watching thunderstorms roll across the orange hoodoos of Bryce Canyon in Utah. 

My journey to medicine followed a similarly scenic route.

WRITER

Seventeen years ago, when I endured a string of life-threatening pregnancy losses and rare medical conditions, being a physician didn’t protect me from feeling isolated and overwhelmed. What I really longed for was a community of women--or even one encouraging story--to reassure me that I wasn’t the only person finding the path to motherhood so complicated.

Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love is my response to that unmet need, weaving together ordinary women’s extraordinary experiences in pregnancy and parenthood. It combines my professional insight as a physician with my personal experiences facing serious pregnancy complications, explores women’s innate resilience in the face of medical and social challenges, and gives voice to difficult but beautiful moments that are too often held in secrecy because they don’t fit neatly into the scripts of families’ lives.

COMMUNITY BUILDER

In every way that I engage, I strive to strengthen relationships by connecting people to community resources, to each other, and to the world around them.