There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir
Author:
Emma Espiner
Publisher:
Penguin
ISBN:
9780143776857
Date published:
09 May 2023
Pages:
192
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$35.00
The striking debut memoir from award-winning doctor and writer, Emma Espiner.
“I don’t know why medicine felt like coming home but, for some reason, it fits. I keep thinking about how the tohu, once awarded, can never be taken back. There are few things in life that emphatic. Better not fuck it up.”
From award-winning writer Dr Emma Espiner comes this striking and profound debut memoir. Encompassing whānau, love, death, ’90s action movies and scarfie drinking, There’s a cure for this is Espiner’s own story, from a childhood spent shuttling between a ‘purple lesbian state house and a series of man-alone rentals’ to navigating parenthood on her own terms; from the quietly perceived inequities of her early life to hard-won revelations as a Māori medical student and junior doctor during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Clear, irreverent and beautiful, this book offers a candid and moving examination of what it means to be human when it seems like nothing less than superhuman will do.
Recommendations:
‘Deadly serious, darkly funny. An exploration of hurt and healing, love and loss, life and death, motherhood and medicine. Espiner’s frank account of finding her vocation as a Māori doctor is so precise it cuts bone deep. A controlled and fearless narrator of the visceral facts of our shared humanity and the various kinds of suffering science is no match for — including, at times, her own — she takes us to the heart of what tears us apart and shows us how to put ourselves back together again.’ — NOELLE McCARTHY
‘Gutsy, fierce, reflective. Dr Emma Espiner tells compelling stories about finding and then making her own path — as a modern Māori woman; a descendant, mother, friend and partner; a doctor of medicine. She does not skip over the twists and turns . . . her insights are both useful and at times provocative.’ — DR HINEMOA ELDER
About the author:
Dr Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and political commentator. Her podcast on Māori health equity, Getting Better: A Year in the Life of a Māori Medical Student (RNZ/Bird of Paradise Productions) won the Voyager Best Narrative Podcast of the Year in 2021. In 2020 she won the Opinion Writer of the Year at the Voyager media awards, and her work has featured at newsroom.co.nz, stuff.co.nz, the Guardian, the NZ Herald and in academic and literary journals and books. Espiner lives in Auckland, where she works at Middlemore Hospital as a surgical registrar. The memoir There’s a Cure for This is her first book.
