BREAKING & MENDING
A JUNIOR DOCTOR’S STORIES OF COMPASSION AND BURNOUT
JOANNA CANNON
Wellcome, 176pp, £12.99
Joanna Cannon is a bestselling novelist. Before that she was a psychiatrist and before that a junior doctor. This is her harrowing memoir of life on the wards. ‘We tell our stories in the hope that someone out there will listen, and we will be understood,’ writes Cannon, and as Katy Guest put it in the Guardian: ‘Breaking & Mending is an account of what nearly broke her when she was a junior NHS doctor.’
In the Telegraph, Christie Watson, a former nurse and author of her own memoir of life on the NHS frontline, found the book ‘breathtaking’. ‘She charts her journey from her first job as a doctor, to the emergency department, and finally towards her specialism in psychiatry, where the real miracles occur: “To remain standing under the weight of these illnesses is a sign of the most enormous courage.”’ In the Sunday Times, Lucy Knight was also moved by a ‘well-paced and often beautifully told’ account ‘despite some dramatic episodes that feel unnecessarily formulaic (there is enough genuine horror in the anecdotes to carry the narrative’s suspense)’.
Melanie Reid in the Times admired Cannon’s ‘ballsiness’ but she was not always convinced by the high-octane drama and agreed with the author’s own conclusion that she was simply not cut out to be a doctor. ‘Truthfully, it is hard to disagree. Breaking & Mending is fundamentally a slim, soul-searching story of unsuitability. I wearied of Cannon’s emotionalism. She writes lyrically, with a novelist’s verve and colour, but she cannot resist hyperbole and – for me at least – it undermines her account.’
The memoir ‘is fundamentally a slim, soulsearching story of unsuitability’