Letter to a Young Female Physician

In 2017, Dr Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by women doctors, including her own personal struggle with “imposter syndrome”—a long-held, secret belief that she was not clever enough or good enough to be a “real” doctor. Accessed nearly 300,000 times by readers around the world, Koven’s Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a work that reflects on her career in medicine, in which women still encounter sexism, pay inequity and harassment. Koven tells engaging stories about her pregnancy during a gruelling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her son and parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother and daughter converged; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. Letter to a Young Female Physician offers an indelible eyewitness account from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher and writer that will encourage readers to embrace their own imperfect selves.

[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

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.