This is an ultimately disappointing account of the author's years spent as the weekend attending of the Bellevue psych emergency room. In this role she treated the most mentally ill of NYC, including drug addicts and criminals. You'd imagine that the author would have reams of material, but swaths of this book felt forced and irrelevant. It's as if her editor told her that she need more: so write down 20 ideas, now expand each of those into five pages. The author's wedding, relationship with her father, therapist, and country house (which she seems to reference on every second page) all receive more attention than any of the medical cases she encountered. It's tempting to contrast this with a book like Pauline Chen's Final Exam A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, in which we see how the experience of practicing medicine and the doctor's own humanity make a better doctor. In this book, we see how a doctor uses her medical experiences to work through her personal history and become, according to her, a better mother. The overall effect is choppy and solipsistic.