Sunita Puri

Sunita Puri is a writer, palliative care physician, and author of That Good Night, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her path to the practice of palliative care and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. The recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and residencies from Yaddo and MacDowell, her work appears in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and New York Times. She lectures widely across the country and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine, where she directs the inpatient palliative care program.

Sunita Puri’s second book explores how trauma and illness reconfigure our relationships with our bodies. Through patient and personal stories, she questions tidy societal narratives of “healing” and “resilience” that suggest there are only certain recognizable ways to face and live with upheaval. By diversifying stories of embodied trauma and illness, and reframing the body as a site not only of suffering but transcendence, she explores how healing includes learning how to live in the one place we can’t leave until we do.