“These are travel notes of a seeker after meaning, and it is the good fortune of her readers that — having found and lived through many answers — she is, in the end, unwilling to regard any of them as final enough to end her search.”

Allen Wheelis, M.D. -- author of How People Change, The Path Not Taken, and The Quest for Identity.

“Rako brings the examined life – hers -- to us in a book that truly reveals how the light got in. With a novelist's eye for detail, she presents a memoir that is a wonderful combination of memory and interpretation.”

George Harrar -- author of The Spinning Man

“This remarkably candid memoir is like a dance in which components of the author's self -- child, parent, lover, learner, teacher, therapist -- move in relation to each other. The reader experiences fragmentation and integration, distress and delight. This is life as lived thoughtfully, deeply and honestly.”

James Sabin, M.D. -- Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Compelling life stories from the personal and professional archives of a gifted psychiatrist.

Dr. Susan Rako is a well respected Boston psychiatrist, a pioneering expert on women’s reproductive health, and a writer whose incisive intelligence enables her to pierce through clutter to deeper meaning.

Rako’s early childhood, textured and flavored by the life of her extended Jewish family, narrowed when she was discovered to be a piano prodigy and then refocused when, at sixteen, she chose to quit music and aimed to study medicine. She married at twenty, became a mother during medical school, and divorced soon after. Dr. Rako was in her 40s before years of therapy - both given and received - freed her to explore her innate and broad-based creativity. She earned a degree in Film at 48, authored The Hormone of Desire at 57, founded Women’s Health On Alert, Inc. at 64, and is more vibrant and alive today, at 65, than ever she was in her youth.

That’s How the Light Gets In is a lyrically wrought memoir whose stories of self, family, friends, patients, and colleagues celebrate the magic and the mystery of life and bear inspirational witness to the power of discovering and standing to one’s truth.

Dr. Susan Rako’s work has been featured in countless publications, and on Today and Dateline NBC. She lives and practices psychiatry in Newton, Massachusetts. www.susanrako.com

That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist is available at Amazon.com.