Third Tuesday Author: Rebecca N. Thompson, MD
Lake Oswego Public Library welcomes local author Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, for a conversation about her book, Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love (HarperCollins 2025).
Held Together recounts Dr. Thompson's complicated path to parenthood as a young doctor many years ago, woven into the stories of her patients, friends, and medical colleagues. Their voices speak not just to the challenges of creating families, but to the many ways that families can grow and change and thrive and struggle as they navigate their relationships across generations. Ranging from devastating to triumphant, from tear-stained to too-awkward-not-to-laugh, from universal to nearly unimaginable, the intimate first-person narratives of Held Together capture the extraordinary moments hidden within ordinary lives and welcomes all kinds of families, born and built and chosen.
Dr. Thompson will be joined in conversation by Kelly Burke, a fellow Oregonian and her former patient. Kelly’s compelling and deeply felt story touches on themes of living with a chronic illness that threatens her personal and professional identities, talking to children about serious medical conditions and death, and recognizing the ways that physical limitations affect how we relate to our loved ones and shape how we understand ourselves.
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"Rebecca Thompson’s moving book proves that there are as many different ways of becoming a family as there are mothers—a personal, compelling reminder of why women’s reproductive healthcare matters, and why one size does not fit all.”
— Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Held Together is a simply wonderful collection, beautifully written, of deep stories of women who have undergone personal loss and have come out on the other side. It is about pain, suffering, danger, endurance, survival, and transcendence. It is so experientially rich that I couldn't put this book down without wanting to know what would come next. Rebecca Thompson has caught life itself and shared it with us. Mothers, husbands, grandparents, doctors, and nurses should read it and will come away with something so very rare—hard-earned wisdom for the art of living!”
— Arthur Kleinman, MD, Harvard University Professor of Psychiatry, Anthropology, and Global Health and Social Medicine and author of The Soul of Care
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Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, is a family medicine and public health physician who specializes in women’s and children’s health. She trained at Harvard, Stanford, and OHSU and has sought opportunities throughout her career to use written and spoken words to make complex medical topics accessible to a wide range of audiences. Held Together is the result of a decade-long collaboration with her patients, friends, and colleagues to share stories of the many ways that family life can take unexpected turns. She lives in Portland, where she spends her free time wandering through green spaces, reading in cozy nooks, playing unreasonably complicated board games, repurposing found objects, and accompanying her husband and children on all-weather adventures near and far. Please find her at www.rebeccanthompson.com.
This program is offered by Lake Oswego Public Library in cooperation with the Lake Theater & Café. Admission is free and no ticket is required (though food and drink purchase are encouraged to offset the cost to the Lake Theater). Doors open at 6:30 and the presentation begins at 7:00. Books will be available for sale and signing after the event, with proceeds and speakers’ fees donated to the Children’s Literacy Project, a national nonprofit organization based in Lake Oswego.
The Lake Theater & Café is located at 106 North State Street in Lake Oswego. For more information, contact Alicia Yokoyama at ayokoyama@lakeoswego.city or 503-534-4228. This presentation is supported by the Friends of the Lake Oswego Public Library.
