Dr. Doris Iarovici has dual careers in psychiatry and writing. Photo credit: Jim Wallace

Durham, N.C. - Dr. Doris Iarovici loves stories with good characters. But as she splits time between her psychiatry practice at Duke's Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) and writing fiction, her treatments part ways.

"In my early fiction, I wanted to cure characters; to fix the problem. But it makes for less interesting fiction. I have to let my characters be more flawed, less amenable to help," Iarovici says. "One similarity that I have learned in psychiatry is that you never want to make assumptions about your patients. That's true with fiction, too. You want to let the story go where it has to."

Iarovici's first collection of fiction, American Dreaming and Other Stories, recently won the 2005 Novello Literary Award, marking the best unpublished collection by a Carolina writer. As part of the award, Novello Festival Press will release the book in October. Much of the collection was written during the years she has spent at Duke, first as a resident and then as a practicing psychiatrist at CAPS.

American Dreaming is full of richly imagined characters, many as they set their lives and relationships on new paths. In the title story, "American Dreaming," Pranee, a Thai woman who has immigrated to the United States, pushes her daughter May to make the most of her opportunities to go to college. But as May grows into a young woman, she strives for her own freedom to choose the next step.

In "Facts," a story about the power of a person's past to shape the future, Lisa reluctantly travels to meet her father for the first time since he abandoned her at birth. The story was awarded the Jack Dyer Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, one of the top short-story honors in the country.

"Facts" is also one of her stories to involve mental illness.

Iarovici has always kept her two professions separate.

"I believe confidentiality is sacred," she says.

At first she simply never wrote about medicine or mental illness to preclude the possibility of her patients thinking she was writing about them.

After working with more than 1,000 patients over the years, she noticed, however, that even her friends and family often assume they are the inspiration for her characters and stories. The suspicions endure even as she strives to write about characters and subjects for which she has no common experience, she said.

Iarovici's interest in writing also predates her studies in medicine. Her family emigrated from Romania to New York City in 1970. At age five, she started school without knowing how to speak English. She nonetheless was soon writing in English and entered Stuyvesant High School, a Manhattan public high school for accelerated students in math and science.

There she met Frank McCourt, who mentored her in writing long before he gained his own literary fame with Angela's Ashes. As a teenager, Iarovici had work published in Seventeen magazine and later wrote some columns for the magazine.

But she had many interests.

"I fell in love with neuroscience," she says. "I was interested in the brain, psychology and biology."

Her parents found that easier to embrace.

"People like my parents kept holding up doctor-writers like Chekhov," she says. "They also said that this is a good day job if you want to write."

Iarovici entered Yale's medical school, but took a year off to write as well. During that year, she obtained an internship with Newsweek and wrote science pieces. Instead of seeing it as a struggle, she embraced both careers for their respective rewards.

"[Medicine] reaffirmed my desire to do something that connected with other people. It was important to me to do something that helped other people," she says. "Writing can be very solitary."

In choosing a field, psychiatry stood out. Neurology had its appeal, but assessing her own strengths made psychiatry the perfect match.

"You learn about people through their stories. All of medicine could benefit from doing that," she says. "But you're supposed to do it in psychiatry. It made use of what I was good at."

Together with her husband, a Duke neurobiologist, Iarovici came to Duke for her residency in the early 90s and has lived in Durham ever since. Her busy schedule fits in a family life with two children, her practice at CAPS and a rewarding writing career. She's been published in the Crescent Review and Crab Orchard Review, and received a Durham Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant and scholarships to both the Wesleyan Writers' Conference and Sewanee Writers' Conference.

As her writing is becoming better known, she's been freer to talk about the connections between her two careers.

"[In psychiatry] I think you have to have tolerance for behavior outside of the norm, and an affection for it as well. I actually think writers are similar in that way. They're into people who are a little bit different. But you look underneath that and you find a more common element of humanity."