Saumya Dave,
Author/Doctor By Tai Sherman
Medical Partnership Alumna Saumya Dave is a writer, psychiatrist, and mental health advocate. Dr. Saumya Dave’s (Class of 2015) new book What a Happy Family, was released this past June. As a writer, she enjoys exploring the unique dynamics that exist in families. Her debut novel, Well-Behaved Indian Women, was featured in The New York Times Book Review, ELLE, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and more. Saumya was born in India and grew up in Atlanta. In her seventh grade journal, she wrote: "I will be a psychiatrist and writer someday". She is a graduate of Georgia Tech and the AU/UGA Medical Partnership, where she was an inductee into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She completed her psychiatry residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, where she was a chief resident and an inductee into the AΩA Medical Honors Society. She completed a psychoanalytic fellowship with the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Dr. Dave was recently interviewed by Mindy McGinnis, for the podcast,
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The PARTNERSHIP PULSE — 2021 Issue
Writer Writer Pants on Fire. During that podcast, Dr. Dave discussed her path to being both a physician and a writer.
“I have been reading fiction for my entire life, so when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a doctor and a writer. It wasn't until college when people said to me, you're going to have to pick one, you can't do both, people don’t do that, and I saw that reflected in the community and the greater world at large around me. So, I thought, okay, I do have to pick and I picked the pre-med part of it and thought, okay, I will write later, I will write in my free time. I learned very quickly that it doesn't always work that way. I know there are a lot of disciplined people out there who can put in their time to all the things that matter to them. But I learned about myself that if I didn't block off hours and if I didn't commit to writing the way I committed to this other career that I was going after, it would get lost eventually. And that was something that really scared me. From a young age, as the daughter of immigrants, as someone who felt like an outsider many, many times growing up, I turned to fiction to teach me about life. When my debut book came out in July of 2020, I learned by going to a lot of virtual book clubs that a lot of people turned to fiction to teach them about life, to comfort them, to entertain them. During my residency training, when I was learning about the ins and outs of psychiatry, I realized I wasn't finding very much fiction that explored mental health. There are books out there that do
