This is a work of creative nonfiction, based on a true story that has been somewhat modified to protect patient confidentiality. Amelia's monologues, rendered in italics, were reconstructed from the author's session notes. Amelia's narrative is gripping and her exploration, with Shapiro's help, of the psychodynamic that resulted in such profound depression (she does attempt suicide) is revealing. Although it turns out that the delivery process may not have caused the child's cerebral palsy, there seems to be no question that mistakes of judgment were made.

The book raises important issues--how physicians are trained to suppress emotions, how mistakes have a profound impact on the physicians who make them (that is--virtually all physicians) yet frank discussion of this impact is rare. Also important and not often articulated (as Amelia does) is the "feeling like a fraud" syndrome that many young professionals, especially women, experience.

A parallel narrative concerns the experience that therapist Dan Shapiro and his wife have with fertility experts. Shapiro, before being treated for Hodgkin's disease (see Mom's Marijuana, annotated in this database), had banked his sperm; he and his wife are attempting to conceive their second child during the course of Doctor Amelia's therapy. In telling his story along with Amelia's, Shapiro conveys his own (sometimes negative) reactions to what he is hearing during his sessions with her. Physicians and psychotherapists, Shapiro argues, are human beings with human responses to challenging circumstances. He makes the case that such humanity must be acknowledged and incorporated into personal and professional life, in order to serve best those one is trying to help.