Author bio

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, MSc, is a family medicine and public health physician from Portland, Oregon, who specializes in women's and children's health. Throughout her career, she has sought opportunities to use written and spoken words to help build community and to make complex medical topics more accessible and more engaging for a wide range of audiences. Her recent book, Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love (HarperCollins 2025), is the result of her decade-long collaboration with a remarkable group of women to share their most intimate true stories about personal relationships, professional identities, and health and healing across generations. Dr. Thompson trained at Harvard, Stanford, and Oregon Health and Science University and is always learning from her most influential teachers—her patients, colleagues, family, and friends. In her free time, she enjoys wandering through green spaces, reading in cozy nooks, playing unreasonably complicated board games, repurposing found objects, and accompanying her husband and children on all-weather adventures near and far.

Writing background

Throughout my career, I have sought opportunities to use written and spoken words to make complex topics accessible to a wide range of audiences. Having discovered my passion for medicine in an unconventional way, I have always appreciated the chance to bring a less traditional perspective to the profession. While completing post-baccalaureate premedical coursework, I served as an editorial assistant at New England Journal of Medicine and taught wilderness medicine to firefighters and Navy SEALs. During college and medical school, I published a book review in the New England Journal of Medicine, a column on day hiking in Harvard Magazine, and ten articles on travel and backcountry medicine topics in the Wilderness Medicine Newsletter, and garnered second place in the Stanford Medical Center Poetry Month Contest for my piece You Have Never Really Heard Me Speak. During residency, I co-authored and published two academic papers and assistant-taught scientific writing to medical and PhD students. More recently, I serve as a medical consultant to best-selling author Jodi Picoult, including for her novels Small Great Things (2016), A Spark of Light (2018), and Hollow Bones.(coming in September 2026). These days, I have been balancing part-time clinical work and busy family schedules with writing and promoting Held Together, a project that weaves together my experiences as a medical professional, as a parent, and as a patient. 

Literary representation

To contact my agent, Laura Gross, about Held Together or other writing projects, please visit her website.

Medical career

To learn more about my professional roles and training, please visit my physician page.