Why I love my book club

And why I'm focusing on community in the lead-up to election day

Welcome to Chief Complaint! For those of you who are new, this newsletter features intermittent musings about medicine, gender, parenting, and body liberation — all from your friendly neighborhood primary care doc. I’m so happy you’re here.

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It’s under one week until election day, and all the election news is really stressing me out. 

I live in Philadelphia, which, if you haven’t heard, is ground zero for election mania, thanks to the antiquated and anti-democratic institution known as the electoral college.

There are billboards everywhere. Every time I turn on NPR, I hear the candidates’ voices. Canvassers keep knocking on my door, often when I’m in a state of undress. (We have a Harris sign in the window, guys!) The candidates keep showing up at the cheesesteak places and shutting down the roads.

And I’ve been giving myself permission, in the words of psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, to hit pause. 

This doesn’t mean that I am hitting pause on being engaged about the election. But I am hitting pause on the anxiety-provoking, hypertension-causing, nail-biting, sleep-disrupting circus of it all.

And instead, I’m focusing on what it means to be a part of a civically engaged community. 

Photo by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash

Building community in the 21st century is hard work. In the context of the election, it’s taken on added meaning: community is how we learn and reinforce political norms.

I truly don’t think anyone decides to vote for a particular candidate based on a random canvasser knocking on their door. 

(And I have been that canvasser, many times! My family also has some interlopers from Massachusetts coming to stay with us this weekend to knock on doors in the Philadelphia suburbs. I wish them the best of luck. I’ll be at the playground and/or making soup.) 

This is part of why I’ve been getting involved in a health care voting project called Vot-ER.  (I was even quoted in an Axios piece about the organization!) My hope, along with the thousands of other health care providers who are involved, is that a conversation between a physician and patient is a more intimate one than a stranger knocking at the door – and that the trust implicit in our relationship can help rebuild trust in the political process. 

In general, over the last few years, I’ve been very interested in what it means to create and sustain community. I read anything I can get my hands on about this topic. I love love love Anne Helen Peterson’s Substack because she is very often engaging in these questions, and I also adore the Ezra Klein Show for the same reason. (Friends who don’t know the show well are often surprised when I mention this, since his reputation is as a political wonk – frankly, I skip all the political insider episodes, and instead listen to episodes about communes and how we can make more time for hanging out with friends.) I am evangelical about the book How We Show Up, by Mia Birdsong. 

I think about community in my clinical work as a primary care doctor, too. The surgeon general has declared loneliness an epidemic, and wrote a book that I loved about the topic. Every day, I take care of people with shocking degrees of social isolation. My patients don’t have anyone to take them to get a colonoscopy, or to visit them if they end up in the hospital. The impacts on health are obvious: many of my patients are hurting because they’re so isolated.

Loneliness can feel like a compounding problem, a cave that’s hard to emerge from. As a doctor, my recommendations to my patients sometimes feel hollow: Volunteer with your religious community? Babysit for the neighbor’s kids? There’s no medication for loneliness.

One thing I’ve learned from everything I’ve read about creating community is that it takes work. We can’t take it for granted. Sometimes it can feel like a burden to follow through on a social commitment, when Netflix and takeout feels so much more frictionless at the end of a difficult week. But in my experience, it’s worth it, every time. 

So today, in the spirit of reflecting on my communities, in anticipation of election day and whatever it brings, I’d like to talk about a group that is very near and dear to me: The Badass Women Book Club (of the Greater Philadelphia area). 

Shout out to any of my book club friends who are kind enough to read this post – I love you guys!

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Thinking about Book Club gives me a good framework for thinking about community-building in general. Since it’s a group made up of 11 busy, professional women, we rely on certain structures to keep us engaged. Pausing to consider those structures and rituals has made me realize how helpful they can be when thinking about community in other parts of my life, too. 

For example, my parents and my brother (along with his spouse and sweet toddlers) recently relocated to the Philly area after living in different cities for almost twenty years. It’s been a bit of an adjustment to figure out what our family community looks like in this new configuration.

The lessons I’ve learned from Book Club, I can apply to (re)building relationships within my family of origin. We’re entering a new phase which I call: I spent my twenties convinced that moving far away to affiliate myself with the fanciest possible institutions was the way to build a good life, when it turns out it’s actually quite nice to live near people who care about me and whom I care about. Yup, it’s an adjustment. 

So what can we learn about community from Book Club? Here are a few principles I’ve observed. 

1. We got our foundational relationships from other affiliations. My friend C, whom I’ve known since high school, got Book Club started with friends of hers from business school. She invited me to join, although the group wanted to meet me first – a process I called Book Club Sorority Rush. (It was actually quite chill, and involved all of us meeting for happy hour.) Grad school is a natural point where people make new friends, so it makes sense that it had its origins there. 

2. But it’s grown organically. I joke that I’m taking over Book Club from the businesswomen by infiltrating it with doctors – two of my physician friends have since joined. Women in the book club have periodically invited new members from their other networks, and the result is a beautiful, organic creation of new community. 

3. We have a clear goal. We’re a serious Book Club – that was the first thing C told me when she first floated the idea of me joining. We read about a book a month, and the norm is that everybody actually reads it. I don’t think a shared interest is necessary to building community, but it certainly helps that everyone in our book club genuinely loves reading and talking about books. 

   

   Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

4. We have rules. And we have a spreadsheet. Despite this, I always joke that Book Club is anarchy in action: there’s no one person in charge, and we all are free to leave at any time. So creating structure, sometimes through a messy consensus process and Google Sheets, helps make sure we’re all on the same page.  

5. We meet regularly. This is so obvious, and so important. We hang out – a lot! Usually once a month, which gives us time to get to know each other and build trust.  And we have lots of opportunities for socializing in between our official book discussion meetings, which are often casual and involve the whole group: someone sends out a text like, “Anyone want to take their kids to the playground with me on Saturday morning?” The structure of our regular meetings has helped make low-key, informal hangouts more feasible. 

6. It can be wonderful to have lots of different types of relationships. When the pandemic hit and we weren’t meeting regularly, I realized how much I missed my casual friendships from Book Club – I was only in touch with the people I felt close enough to Zoom with, which was (and is) a weirdly intimate form of communication. I really missed the friends whom I might not see one-on-one for intense discussions of our deepest fears, but whose friendship I valued nonetheless. 

7. It’s not always easy to commit. But when we do, it’s worth it. A monthly meeting can feel like a lot sometimes. I have work, a kid, family commitments, yadda yadda yadda. And of course, people periodically miss meetings. But when I committed, I really committed. It’s nice to know that the other women in the group feel the same way. 

8. We’re not too big, but not too small. I read the Art of Gathering by Priya Parker a few years ago, and one recommendation from that book really struck me: sometimes being exclusive makes gatherings more meaningful. This is antithetical to my personality. I love to invite everyone to everything – the more the merrier! But sometimes, making every event for everyone can make them less special. (For example: My son’s first birthday party, to which I invited basically everyone I knew. I spent the afternoon in a gazillion short conversations, stressed out that everyone was having a good time, and missed taking in the big milestone.) Book Club, by design, isn’t too big, so that the discussions don’t get unwieldly and it makes it a bigger deal to skip meetings. 

9. The host actually hosts. No mediocre potlucks around here where everyone brings a tub of hummus. We take turns hosting, which means providing the food and the space. It’s so lovely to get to try everyone’s cooking. (Or try everyone’s preferred bagels.) 

10. We have a group text, but it’s not the only thing holding us together. Sometimes it can feel like so much of relationship-building in the 21st century takes place over text message. The group text is a lot of fun – people propose random meet-ups, or share news, or send pictures of kids and dogs – but it feels like a complement to real life. 

Whew - that’s a lot. This was fun to think about and put into writing. 

So next, I’ll turn the question to you. How are you building community in your lives?

Oh, and don’t forget to vote. :)