GLR November-December 2022

opposed to the nonexistence imposed upon your life.” He might be speaking to himself. At the end of this short but powerful book, Louis notes that it would be too simple to see his mother’s story as a tale about a “happy transformation.” She has still never traveled outside France. She relies on the man she lives with for money; she can’t make friends with the people in her new neighborhood. “And yet she is happy,” Louis asserts. “Perhaps the question is not what change means, but what happiness means. I haven’t found any answers, but I know that her current existence, what she has become, forces me to confront the question.”

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations strikes me as the least angry and the least politically charged of Louis’ four books. In revisiting the same material, I wondered if he had run out of something new to say. Early on in the book, Louis antic ipates this possible criticism: “I want to write only the same story again and again, returning to it until it reveals fragments of its truth.” It’s that fierce, determined quest to get at the truth—even “fragments” of the truth—behind poverty, class, gender domination, racism, and homophobia that makes Édouard Louis an author well worth reading no matter how many times he hits the same notes.

Residency Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Go Out

H OSPITAL “ROUNDS” are in patient visits by a group of doc tors and nurses to review each patient’s status and care plan. The term suits this spirited memoir, which recounts the efforts of a young Arizona woman to earn an M.D. degree and become a board-certified doctor in the 1970s. Writ ing under an assumed name to protect her privacy, Patricia Grayhall also describes the

Grayhall’s professional story is all about pluck. Drawn to the path taken by her grandfather, a well-liked general practi tioner, she applies to medical school while a junior at Arizona State. Astonishingly, the University of Utah accepts her without a college degree, and in the fall of 1971 she moves to Salt Lake City. One of five women among 100 students, she rooms with an also closeted gay medical student,

R OSEMARY B OOTH

MAKING THE ROUNDS Defying Norms in Love and Medicine by Patricia Grayhall She Writes Press. 344 pages, $17.95

exhausting personal “rounds” she was making at the same time, vaulting from one amorous relationship to another in search of a life partner. The author was born in Phoenix in 1950 and became aware of her attraction to girls as early as grade school. With a mother who insisted on typically feminine dress and behavior and a fa ther frequently hospitalized for depression, Patricia worried that being a lesbian might point to mental health issues for her, too. By high school she was six feet tall, “uncoordinated, bespecta cled and studious.” She spent hours in the local library, where the books she could find about homosexuality said it was a men tal illness caused by difficulties in childhood, that treatment was often unsuccessful, and that homosexuals were doomed to un happy lives. Grayhall’s research turned up a phone number for Daughters of Bilitis, the first U.S. lesbian rights organization, and she re quested a copy of their publication The Ladder (1956–’72). Its short stories and poetry saluted lesbian love, but her mother’s appalled reaction to the magazine dampened her hopes. She re solved to prove she “wasn’t lesbian” by dating men, but when one such affair ended in a frightening trip to Nogales, Mexico, for an abortion, the nineteen-year-old stopped “pretending to be straight.” Making the Rounds takes off from there, using material from Grayhall’s journals, letters, and interviews to chronicle her ex perience from medical school through residency, fellowship, and boards. The memoir interweaves details from the writer’s medical training with episodes from her struggle to find a soul mate, but the stories are considered separately here, for clarity. Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. November–December 2022

David. The arrangement wards off inquiries about sexual iden tity and relieves the author’s fear of being “ostracized for being a lesbian.” The amiable duo would share quarters for the next decade. Medical school is predictably demanding, but Grayhall does well. Her residency at Boston University Hospital proves harsher. As the only woman intern, she’s routinely disregarded or unfairly singled out for criticism. Angry and despondent, she focuses on a broader concern, the medical center’s practice of testing and treating patients regardless of the pain involved, even when there is no hope of recovery. When she writes a let ter to the Harvard School of Public Health expressing these wor ries, she’s offered a research fellowship in occupational and environmental health. Three years later she finishes the inter rupted residency, passes boards in two fields, and accepts a po sition with the recently created Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in Washington, D.C. By 1980, Grayhall’s medical career is well launched, but her tougher parallel quest for lasting love has come up empty. That search had begun the summer before medical school, when the author visited San Francisco and its iconic lesbian bar, Maud’s, where she met Cecilia, an older Asian woman and literature stu dent. “I towered over her,” says the author, who found herself “overwhelmed by the ecstatic release” in their lovemaking. But when she couldn’t meet Cecilia’s request to stop dating others, things cooled. During her first year of medical school, while on rotation at New England Medical Center, Grayhall hangs out at The Saints, a popular lesbian bar in Boston, where she spots Cass, a mother of two who’s separated from her husband and lives in New Hampshire. Captivated, Grayhall rides a bus to Peterborough on weekends, but once back in Utah on other rotations she falls

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