Suzanne Koven is a primary care physician and the inaugural writer-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Boston Globe, and other publications. A faculty member at Harvard Medical School, she lives near Boston.
[These] phenomenal essays...are full of acuity and generosity... [Koven's] writing is full of humor, candor, by turns (and often simultaneously) beautiful and heartbreaking shards of narrative, about her own life and the lives of her patients and colleagues. She's also got a killer sense of humor and a fantastic eye for detail.--Leslie Jamison LitHub Funny, touching, and self-deprecating... [A] thought-provoking and inspiring memoir.-- Booklist Suzanne Koven has written a remarkable memoir about her life as a doctor that is at once heartwarming, poignant, and breathtaking in its precision; this is a book about the essence of medicine, and will be invaluable to any doctor. But in its compassionate reflections on caring for the human body, it is also a book about life, and what makes a good one. I couldn't stop reading.--Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye [Koven] is rueful and delightful and keeps on building a careening and fascinating life... [Letter to a Young Female Physician] is a warm and wry epistle, the endless and near-perfect email you wish your mother, your mentor and your therapist would sit down and type out together.--Laura Kolbe Wall Street Journal In Letter to a Young Female Physician, Suzanne Koven charts both the real and the spurious demands that the medical system makes on those who become doctors and care for us all. Her memoir is by turns reassuring and disturbing, comical and tragic, hopeful and dire. Medicine has advanced, but the particular difficulties facing young physicians have grown no less steep, and the impediments women continue to face even as they take a majority place in medical schools are considerable. Koven writes with style and wit and grace--but, more significantly, with insight and compassion.--Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree Suzanne Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician is so wise, beautifully written, tender, and full of heart that it should be required reading for every person--young, female, physician, or otherwise. This is a transporting memoir, and an instructive one.--Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance