ALUMNI DAY SYMPOSIUM

When the White Coat Comes with a Pen

Photo by Steve Gilbert “What it has done is to make me a better physician,” Jerome Groopman said of his writing.

Some authors have been composing stories since they could hold a pencil, so natural and insistent is their gift for writing. Others—the literary late bloomers—may take decades to uncover their talent. For Jerome Groopman, that moment came in his early 40s when he found himself, inexplicably, on the brink of a midlife crisis.

“I was desperately in love with my wife. And I had no interest in sports cars,” said Groopman, the Dina and Raphael Recanati professor of medicine at HMS and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, speaking on June 5 at the Alumni Day Symposium, “Doctors as Writers.” Rejecting the usual alternatives, Groopman decided to write. Sitting at his kitchen table in the dusky hours before dawn, he banged out three stories that, after much reworking, would appear in his first book, The Measure of Our Days. One of them, an edgy tale about a wealthy cancer-ridden patient, would so impress the then editor of The New Yorker that she offered him a regular gig as staff writer. “Tina Brown said my story was hot,” Groopman said.

Photo by Steve Gilbert George Thibault said the theme for the "Doctor as Writers" symposium was inspired by the recent passing of the famous novelist and HMS alum, Michael Crichton.

There is a special thrill in hearing the story behind a writer’s stories. The nearly 200 attendees at the symposium, held beneath an enormous tent on the Quad lawn, were thoroughly engaged as they heard Groopman and three other well-known physician-authors—Perri Klass, Elissa Ely and Stephen Bergman (aka Samuel Shem)—recount how they got their start as writers. What was striking, as symposium organizer George Thibault, HMS ’69 and president and CEO of the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, noted in his introduction, was their variety.

“I got my start as a writer growing up in a household with a mother who thought everyone should be a writer,” said Klass, HMS ’86, who has two siblings, both writers. In fact, all three would turn their mother’s love of stories to their advantage. “You could always get out of walking the dog by saying, ‘Mom, I just had an idea I need to write down,’” she said.

Photo by Jan Reiss Elissa Ely said of her father’s death: “The story grew fangs and haunted me.”

Ely was also deeply influenced by her family and in particular her father, who died when he was 35 and she was 5. “He disappeared into Memorial Sloan-Kettering and never came out,” she said, adding that this loss, and her quest to understand it, haunted her early stories and still drives her writing. “After 46 years, I’m still writing about my father,” said Ely, HMS ’88, a psychiatrist who is a regular contributor to The Boston Globe and National Public Radio.

It was later in life, during a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford working in a lab studying cockroaches, that Bergman, HMS ’73, decided he wanted to be a writer (also see “HMS & HSDM Class Day,” page 1). One day, he told the director of his lab who, with characteristic British aplomb, responded, “Well then, have a sherry.”

Photo by Steve Gilbert “Doctors live in a world full of stories,” said Perri Klass. “Medicine does make writers of us all.”

Despite their diverse beginnings, there were common themes running through the tales. Several of the speakers described in agonizing and amusing detail their early disappointments. Klass, who is currently a professor of journalism and medicine at New York University, received nearly 600 rejection notes before publishing her first article.

Groopman described making the rounds of New York editors to sell his first book. One—an older woman with bouffant hair and red nails who looked like she had just flown in from a canasta game in West Palm Beach—said, “Doctor? I’m sure you’re a very good doctor.” She then went on to tell him what was wrong with his stories, namely that their characters did not demonstrate the proper number of epiphanies.
Ironically, the story that so impressed Brown, The New Yorker editor, was a tale about an arrogant cancer patient who has a remission only to realize how empty his life is. “It really was an epiphany that didn’t end happily,” Groopman said.

Doctors hear and live out stories like that every day, which is why Klass said she prefers writing fiction to nonfiction. “When you write fiction you can choose the ending,” she said. “The hardest thing about medicine, as you all know, is that you cannot always choose the ending.”

—Misia Landau

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