What is Patricia Grayhall reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Patricia Grayhall, author of Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine.

Her entry begins:

Over the past three years while writing my memoir, I read other memoirs to gain inspiration. Notables included Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me and Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game.

Most recently, I have read Felice Cohen’s Half In: A Coming of Age Memoir of Forbidden Love. This is an unusual story of a 23-year-old college woman who falls in love with her boss, a 57-year-old woman and Director at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who returns her love. Not only is the age-gap a barrier to Cohen revealing her love even to her closest friends and family, but her boss, Sarah, is already in a relationship and living with another woman. This story has been told in various forms in heteronormative relationships, and some of the same power dynamics apply, but with the added layer of secrecy because it occurred at a time when it was still not safe to...[read on]

About Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine, from the publisher:

Defying expectations of a woman growing up in Arizona in the 1960s, Patricia Grayhall fled Phoenix at nineteen for the vibrant streets of San Francisco, determined to finally come out as a lesbian after years of trying to be a “normal” girl. Her dream of becoming a physician drew her back to college, and then on to medical school in conservative Salt Lake City.

Though Patricia enjoyed a supportive friendship with a male colleague, she longed for an equal, loving relationship with a woman. But her graduate medical training in Boston, with its emotional demands, long hours, lack of sleep, and social isolation, compounded by the free-wheeling sexual revolution of the 1970s, made finding that special relationship difficult. Often disappointed but never defeated, Patricia—armed with wit and determination—battled on against sexism in her male-dominated profession and against discrimination in a still largely homophobic nation, plunging herself into a life that was never boring and certainly never without passion.

A chronicle of coming of age during second-wave feminism and striving to have both love and career as a gay medical doctor, Making the Rounds is a well-paced and deeply humanizing memoir of what it means to seek belonging and love—and to find them, in the most surprising ways.

Visit Patricia Grayhall's website.

Writers Read: Patricia Grayhall.

--Marshal Zeringue