Navigating Life's Challenges with Resilience, Positivity, Humor, and Song

Joan Liman is a theater-loving physician whose earliest career goal was to be a lyricist and producer. However, many years spent at "the other end of the stethoscope" led her to take a rather circuitous route to achieving it. Her funny, witty, and poignant memoir recounts her growing up in 1950s Brooklyn and a mother who suffered from lifelong depression. Her college years in the 1960s were marked by the campus unrest of the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Marriage and motherhood followed before she started medical school when she was in her thirties. Then came dire diagnoses-stage IV non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, hospitalizations for bipolar disorder, and stage 3 breast cancer. Surviving against all odds and after years of a career in medical academia, she pursued her lifelong dream: theater writing and producing. Through it all, she finds "the divine in tragedy" and the humor in life, often through writing song parodies.

Joan takes the reader inside her journey through depression: The slide into sadness was a gradual one - until it wasn't. Like stepping into a lake and walking tentatively to find a spot in which you can begin swimming when suddenly, there is a deep drop off and you find yourself underwater, struggling to get back on top.

Raw and brave, Joan's story tackles medical and mental health crises, impostor syndrome, and getting through life's adversities with resilience, a positive attitude, a wicked sense of humor, and a song.