In this collection of funny, touching, and self-deprecating essays, physician Koven covers extensive ground: being a doctor’s daughter, becoming a doctor and a mom, dealing with family health issues, experiencing sexism in her profession, and coping with the impostor syndrome. It’s easy to root for likable, modest Koven, who, despite all her accomplishments—majoring in English literature at Yale, going to medical school at Johns Hopkins, joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School—worries about things like her weight and her natural chattiness.

This book unfolds in roughly chronological essays, each with a gentle but firmly instructive bent—it comes as less than a surprise when, about 100 pages in, we learn that Dr. Koven flirted with the idea of leaving medicine and becoming a rabbi. Again and again, she tosses a comic’s banana peel ahead of herself, each seeming blunder becoming another victory for self-knowledge, hers and the reader’s...She is rueful and delightful and keeps on building a careening and fascinating life. Through it all, Dr. Koven never quite loses the genteelness of bedside manner.

Koven directs her book’s thoughtful and honest essays to women entering medicine and flags some of the challenges they may face in a demanding field. Drawing inspiration from Selzer, as well as from her father’s medical career, Koven recounts what drew her to medicine and the obstacles she faced along the way, including enduring misogyny at the hands of fellow students.

Graceful reflections on being a female doctor by a longtime primary care physician.

A vulnerable if often frustrating memoir of a life and career spent continually questioning her place and abilities.