Rise After Silence: An ER Doctor and the Patients Who Healed Her

From an ER physician and survivor of private violence comes a surprising, unflinching debut literary memoir that takes us behind the scenes of the emergency department-where her patients are wrestling with what feels unspeakable, and so is she.

Told with dark humor and hard-won honesty, Dr. Anne Aspler brings readers into the chaotic world of emergency medicine-and the quieter, messier work of healing her own past.

Rise After Silence is a close-up view of ten cases from the frontline of the ER, each one a mirror for the questions Dr. Anne is asking herself about how violence migrates through a life and a lineage. One day, Dr. Anne is the physician treating patients in crisis. The next, she is in one of her own-deciding how to explain her convicted rapist father, and her mother, lost to schizophrenia and the streets, to her young daughters.

Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written, Rise After Silence invites the reader to transform alongside Dr. Anne. She and her sister, Marcia-both shaped by religious fundamentalism, foster care, and family violence-reckon in different ways with what to pass on. Longing to give her daughters an honest picture of the past, and aching to believe people can change, Dr. Anne wrestles with whether to let them meet their grandfather, now out of prison.

This book is for anyone affected by private violence-in any of its forms, at the hands of any person, within any institution. But it is also for those who haven't been, because private violence does not stay private. It compounds. It migrates. And there is growing evidence that it is one of the quiet engines of the public violence we struggle to explain.

One of the most compelling medical memoirs of our time, Rise After Silence is a visceral, unsparing story about what we inherit, the freedom of choosing what we pass on, and how strangers in our worst hours can sometimes quietly hand us back to ourselves.