MAKING THE ROUNDS: DEFYING NORMS IN LOVE AND MEDICINE could easily act as a primer in Lesbian lit. Patricia Grayhall's memoir of growing up gay in Arizona and her years of med school in Utah, where she was one of five women in a class of a hundred is a real eye-opener. Or it was to this old man. I was expecting the book to be mostly about the "medicine" side of things, and while there is plenty here about her experiences as a med student, intern and resident, in Utah and then in Boston, and how, as a woman, she was treated as second-class, there is a helluva lot more about her first fumbling attempts at dating and relationships with other women, including some pretty graphic sex scenes. It's probably also important to point out that, as a very young woman, Grayhall tried to be 'straight," and had a lengthy and most unequal and unsatisfying relationship with a much older man, followed by another shorter one which left her pregnant and desperate. A quick trip across the border into Mexico and the pregnancy was terminated. This was still the sixties, so ... Grayhall (not her real name, a pseudonym; in fact all the names in here have been changed) was obviously a very intelligent and ambitious young woman. She interrupted her residency in Boston to earn two Masters degrees at Harvard, one in Public Health and the other in Physiology. She later completed her board certification and worked for OSHA in D.C. for a time and volunteered at a women's health clinic. But the lion's share of her story - set in the seventies - centers around some very intense affairs and relationships with other women, sometimes two or more concurrently, as she found many women to be irresistibly attractive.

The author waited nearly forty years to tell her story and is now semi-retired and happily married to a woman she met in London. She is an excellent writer and I enjoyed her story. I find other readers have labeled it superior "Lesbian lit." I have very little experience in such a category, but I will not disagree. As a memoir, it is superb. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )