Welcome! I am so glad you stopped by. My name is Sunita Puri, and I am a writer of memoir and nonfiction. I am also a palliative medicine physician and am the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program at the UMass Chan School of Medicine, where I am an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine. So much of palliative medicine is about finding compassionate and precise ways to give voice to life’s hardest subjects: what it means to live a good life and to die well, what we want our lives to look like when we are seriously ill, the ways we would want our bodies and souls handled when our bodies approach their natural limits. Language is central to both of my professions, each of which ultimately reaches for stories, and searches for the essential human truths at their core.
I have been writing since I was five years old and my father told me I’d have to write one page per day about anything I wanted. He really wanted me to master the English language in order to succeed in the United States. Little did he know he was my first writing teacher. Somewhere in my twenties I graduated from my awful teenage poetry to writing about my life and medicine, especially as I was going through training. My book, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, was published in 2019, and I’ve also written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Slate, JAMA, JAMA-Internal Medicine, and, forthcoming, the New Yorker. I have been very lucky to have space and time away from the hospital to write in beautiful locations during writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, UCross Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Mesa Refuge.
Writing and doctoring aside, here are a few things that animate my life: my amazing family. Tupac Shakur. Painting. Prosecco. The New York Times Cooking section. My two cats and gorgeous German Shepherd. Rainer Maria Rilke and Jane Hirschfield. Crisp air and apple crisp. My ride-or-die friends from all eras of my life. The way a really deep breath and a long exhale feel. Michele de Montaigne and Sigrid Nunez. The feeling of agreeing to a challenge you never anticipated that changes your life in ways you could have never seen coming. Russell Peters and Jim Gaffigan and Brett Goldstein.
I’ve often looked at author websites looking for inspiration, or at least something about what they told themselves to get through the harder parts of writing and publishing. If you are an aspiring writer, I wanted to send you a few words of encouragement that I had to give myself during all the times when my self doubt and inner critic grew into gigantic monsters in my head:
Only you can write your story. It is worthy of an audience. There are going to be some hard moments when you sit at your desk and stare at your computer screen or journal and wonder whether your ideas have merit, whether your stories are derivative, whether anyone in their right mind would start and finish your work. When you’re in the throes of these moments, remember that if you are called to write, you have something to say. Writing is hard, solitary work. But if a story is pushing against your bones, you’re the one the muse chose to write it. Get out of your own way. Celebrate when you write a paragraph you love. Your first draft will not be your shiny, beautiful final accomplishment. Find a circle of friends who will read and give you honest feedback. One sentence at a time. Read. A LOT. Fiction and nonfiction. Poetry. American and global literature. Study the writers you like, and the writers you don’t like. Become the writer you love.
Photo credit David Zaugh.