What Looks Like Bravery
A Memoir
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Our stories don’t just give us the power to communicate—they give us the power to heal. New York Times bestselling author and Stanford professor Laurel Braitman is a driving force in bridging the gap between storytelling and the medical world. She works with doctors and medical students—who, like many other frontline workers, are facing record levels of burnout—and proves that the simple act of telling our own stories can help build community, improve mental health, and equip us with the communication skills we need to make a real difference for those around us. “No matter what profession we choose,” Laurel says, “we can make meaning, find beauty in the hard stuff, and create.”
Laurel Braitman is the Director of Writing and Storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Animal Madness and the forthcoming book What Looks Like Bravery. In the Medicine and the Muse program at Stanford, she works with medical students and professionals to reintroduce the power of storytelling to the healthcare field. She’s seen firsthand how telling your own story—“flying your flag”—can relieve stress, avert burnout, strengthen resilience, and empower you to build connections based on authenticity and vulnerability. In her workshops, she teaches doctors and frontline workers writing skills that they use to make meaning and find beauty even in the toughest moments of their careers. The practical skills and lessons she teaches enable us to develop better mental health, heal ourselves and one another, and build communities that rally together with compassion and authenticity.
Laurel’s upcoming memoir What Looks Like Bravery is a powerful look at how unexamined grief can persist over decades. Through the lens of her own life, and a childhood spent worrying about her father with cancer, Laurel sensitively and honestly explores how confronting our grief can help us live the life we really want, and how the pain of loss can transform us into the people we want to become.
Her previous book, the New York Times bestseller Animal Madness, is a “lovely, big-hearted book” (The New York Times) investigating mental illness in the animal kingdom—from anxious dogs to depressed bears. Susan Orlean, bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, calls it “a marvelous, smart, eloquent book—as much about human emotion as it is about animals and their inner lives.”
Laurel holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT, and is a Senior TED Fellow. She’s the founder of Writing Medicine, a global community of writing healthcare professionals. Her work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America, and Al Jazeera. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, on Radiolab, in The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and National Geographic, among others. She’s worked in Alaska studying grizzly bears, made coffee for the Hell’s Angels, taught backpacking, and volunteered with grieving kids. Laurel splits her time between the remote Alaskan wilderness and her family’s citrus and avocado ranch in Southern California.