The striking debut memoir from award-winning doctor and writer, Emma Espiner.

"I graduated as a doctor in 2020 and arrived into the Covid-19 pandemic with my ta moko on my arm, my hospital lanyard, my stethoscope and a purpose.

I don't know why medicine felt like coming home. I had no right to have that experience, but for some reason it fits. I keep thinking about what the Maori psychiatrist told us in Gisborne, about how the tohu, once awarded, can never be taken back. There are few things in life which are that emphatic. Better not fuck it up, eh."

From award-winning writer Dr Emma Espiner comes this striking debut memoir.

Encompassing whanau, love, death, '90s action movies and more, Espiner charts her life in a dozen poised, interconnected chapters, from her childhood shuttling between a 'purple lesbian state house and a series of man-alone rentals' to navigating parenthood on her own terms; and from the quietly perceived inequities of her early life to hard-won revelations as a Maori medical student and junior doctor during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clear, candid, irreverent and beautiful, these intimate, essayistic stories offer a moving examination of what it means to be human when it seems like nothing less than superhuman will do.

This is Espiner at her best - and as you've never read her.