Books like In Stitches

I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.

I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.

I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.

I am a retired, Scottish, NHS consultant forensic psychiatrist, who worked with mentally disordered offenders in prisons, hospitals, and in the community. I am passionate about raising awareness, destigmatisation of mental illness, and introducing the human beings behind the sensationalist newspaper headlines. They are all someone's son or daughter, who didn't ask to get ill. Occasionally mental illness makes good people do bad things. It was my job to find, treat and rehabilitate them. I believe entertaining medical memoirs can engage readers and inform thinking by challenging attitudes and assumptions.

I'm not Maggie, my title character, but we share a smart mouth, and it has put me in the dog house more than once. Coming-of-age stories appeal to my “Will-I-ever-grow-up?” nature. At any given moment you’re as old as you’ve ever been, which is why an adolescent, lost in unfolding maturity, seldom has the sense of a zygote—nor does a twenty-something, thirty-something, and on up the line (sixty-six and counting). A backward glance is your best bet at gleaning pearls of wisdom. Passing from one life-phase into another is awkward at best. Its navigation, something humans share regardless of time or place, lends to humor. Oh, there’s heartache. Often suffering. But in laughter lies hope.

I grew up on a Viking battlefield, in an English coastal village once raided then occupied by Norsemen. We had ancestors who lived on the Isle of Orkney, and in the Celtic south-west. From a young age, I read Norse and Celtic myths and legends, and went on to study history and philosophy – and then became an author. Now, I have family in Sweden and grandchildren of Ash and Elm. My list offers pure escapism, but also shows how our ancestors lived in an age with no electricity or compulsory schooling. It’s the wonderful combination of the ‘other world’ myths and history that I believe makes us who we are. 

I grew up on a Viking battlefield, in an English coastal village once raided then occupied by Norsemen. We had ancestors who lived on the Isle of Orkney, and in the Celtic south-west. From a young age, I read Norse and Celtic myths and legends, and went on to study history and philosophy – and then became an author. Now, I have family in Sweden and grandchildren of Ash and Elm. My list offers pure escapism, but also shows how our ancestors lived in an age with no electricity or compulsory schooling. It’s the wonderful combination of the ‘other world’ myths and history that I believe makes us who we are. 

I'm a contemporary romance writer with two novels: No Hard Feelings and Crushing, stories about complex, messy women making mistakes and learning from them. As I work on my third novel, I'm remembering how hard it is to write when you're in a reading rut. Sometimes every book I pick up is disappointing, and reading feels like a chore, and I risk losing momentum. Sometimes I need something familiar to get back on track and remember why I love my job. These books feel like a long exhale. I can come to them with an overloaded brain, bad moods and doubt and discontent, and turn the last page restored.

I grew up a closeted gay in a very straight world. I enjoy reading both true and fictional stories about how others grew up and came out. I decided to write about coming-out and coming-of-age because this mixture of topics just didn’t exist when I was a teen. The books that I have listed here are ones that I feel capture both the realism of what is, what we wished had been, and the hope of what could be—a world where "coming out" wouldn’t be necessary.

Growing up, I hardly ever saw books written by people who looked like me, about people who looked like me. When I did, the Asians were often side characters, typecast as nerds (and not in a good way). I didn’t get to see Asians being “cool” kids, and I definitely didn’t see them as love interests. When I went to a performing arts boarding school, it was the first time I wasn’t the only Asian student in my class, and it was life-changing. I think if I had had these books when I was a kid, it would’ve been easier to be confident about who I was.