Dr. Maya Rao built her career as a gynecologist to serve, educate, and empower women. In addition to her demanding job, she juggles care for her three small children and copes with the trauma of a mistake buried deep in her professional past. One day, the stress becomes too much for Maya to handle – and Maya is forced to walk away from her job at the hospital.
Despondent and scrambling for a new opportunity, Maya is thrilled when a fellow mom at her daughter’s school approaches her with an offer. Amelia DeGilles, well-to-do entrepreneur and socialite, has founded Eunoia Women’s Health: a concierge wellness clinic that specializes in house calls for its elite clientele in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Amelia has been searching for a gynecologist to make her business complete – it’s the perfect remedy for both women.
No vitamin infusion or healing crystal is too expensive for Eunoia’s patients, and despite her years of medical training and expertise, Maya finds herself catering to every whim with flashy, unproven treatments – odd birthing ceremonies and curative mind journeys included. As Maya forms a friendship with the beautiful, successful Amelia, she may be overlooking the scandalous secrets at the heart of the very organization she’s been working for – and putting at risk the lives of the women she so desperately aims to help.
Tell us about At Least You Have Your Health!
A gynecologist takes a job with a chic wellness company, making house calls for its clientele of wealthy women. As she’s drawn into their world of privilege, she finds herself grappling with her own ambition while racing to uncover the truth behind a deadly secret.
What prompted you to write this book?
The pandemic. I wrote this book in 2020, and it was my way of processing everything that was happening in my life and in the world at large. As a doctor, there was of course the challenge of being in the medical field during the worst global health crisis in a century. As a parent, I also lived with the daily stress of having two young children—one of whom was in kindergarten—at home doing virtual school while also worrying if I would bring the virus home to them. At the same time, Me Too and Black Lives Matter were sharpening our collective discourse on issues of gender and race. I’d understood, in my bones, what being a model minority was about because it was my lived reality as an Indian American, but I’d never heard the term “racial triangulation” until 2020. As a writer, it was a revelation to have words to express something I’d always felt was true but never knew how to articulate. And while all of that was happening, the pandemic was laying bare the injustices of not only race, but its counterpart, class. We saw the virus decimate the lower classes while Town & Country reported on all the wealthy New Yorkers who were fleeing to the Hamptons to ride out the pandemic in their beach-front mansions while trying to optimize their immune systems with ashwagandha and vitamin infusions. I wanted to write about all of it—motherhood and feminism and race and class and healthcare—because I wanted to make sense of it all in my own mind.
What are some of your current and future projects that you can share with us?
I’m currently working on my third book, but I can’t say much about it yet. That’s not because I’m being secretive, but because I invent the story as I go along. I’m never really sure what the book is about until I’ve finished it. So far all I have is that it’s a story about two sisters who don’t really get along.
What do you hope for readers to be thinking when they read your novel?
I hope At Least You Have Your Health! starts people thinking about, among other things, the dangers of an unregulated wellness industry, the failings of modern medicine (because, honestly, if we were doing a better job as doctors communicating with and caring for patients, people wouldn’t feel the need to look to the wellness industry for answers), and health equity and access to healthcare. I hope it makes the case that South Asians unequivocally deserve a seat at the table when we’re talking about race in America. For my fellow South Asian Americans, I hope it gets us talking about white adjacency and racial triangulation. And of course, I hope people also enjoy the ride. It’s a fun story about some outrageous characters. I hope readers will laugh along the way too.
What are you currently reading?
We Were Never Here, by Andrea Bartz. I’m late to the party on this one. It’s such a well-plotted, well-written thriller and I’m loving it so far.
Where can readers find you?
My website is madisinha.com. I’m on IG and Twitter at @madisinha