Guest post written by The Ripple Effect author Maggie North
Maggie North writes deeply emotional, strangely hilarious novels about introverts at the end of their @#$% ropes, STEM, Canada, and other overlooked, underrated things you’d love to discover. A doctor by day and author by night, she lives in Ottawa, Canada, with her spouse, The Kid, and a rotating cast of hypoallergenic aquarium friends. She is represented by Claire Friedman at InkWell Management.
About The Ripple Effect (out 17 June 2025): A grumpy burnt out physician and a sunshine psychologist must fake an engagement to save his whitewater canoeing/ relationship therapy startup in Maggie North’s sparkling second novel about starting over.
In May 2023, three weeks after the World Health Organization declared an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, I left my job in critical care medicine. I’d once loved that job with my whole heart, but I remember telling a friend I wasn’t sure I should be a doctor anymore.
You’re burned out, my friend told me. Personally, I wasn’t so sure about that. A defining feature of burnout is feeling drained of emotion, and I had plenty of emotions. Granted, most of them fell somewhere between moderate aggravation and incandescent fury, but I definitely had them.
Around the same time, I pitched my editor a companion novel to my debut romance, Rules for Second Chances. The main character would be a burned-out physician who quit her job. If the subject matter seemed a little heavy, I wasn’t worried. The great thing about romance is that readers will stick with a book through difficult topics because they know the happy ending is on its way. I mean, Emily Henry wrote a romantic comedy featuring a death cult—surely readers could handle a teensy bit of burnout?
My editor green-lighted the book, although she did caution me to take it easy on the main character. At that point, I wish I could say that I made the connection between what I was feeling and what I wanted to write about. Unfortunately, in life—as in romance—there’s usually a lesson that must be learned before a character can move forward in a whole-hearted way. For me, there were two lessons: first, what was up with all the anger? And second, what does it take to come back from burnout? The answers to those two questions became the backbone of my second novel, The Ripple Effect.
First up: anger research. I was fascinated to learn that anger commonly masks deeper emotions like fear and grief. I also discovered that women are socialized not to acknowledge their anger and are punished for showing it. Meanwhile, men who get angry at work are often rewarded for it. That definitely tracked with my experiences at hospital meetings, where I was once called “emotional” by three different men in less than ten minutes and I hadn’t even raised my voice, much less shed a tear.
Annoyed by the anger gender gap, I flipped the script and wrote about a pissed-off ex-ER doctor named Stellar Byrd. Underneath her rage, she grieves the loss of the calling she loved and fears that loss will cost her everything. Her perfect opposite became a man named McHuge, whose gigantic size meant people expected him to control his anger from a very young age. He can’t forget the one time when, at seventeen, he lost that control. Both Stellar and McHuge need to develop a healthy relationship with anger—which as it turns out, isn’t necessarily a “bad” emotion. Anger is a crucial signal that something in our world isn’t right. It gives us the energy to work for positive change, which both characters very much want to do.
When I finished with anger, I turned to burnout. As a physician and scientist, I was familiar with the clinical definition. As a writer, I found a definition that made my jaw drop in recognition: Burnout occurs when someone consistently gives more compassion and effort than they receive in return. I knew Stellar had to have a deep preoccupation with making sure she gets as much as she gives, because that’s how she protects herself from burning out more deeply. Meanwhile, McHuge turns to unhealthy generosity, giving everything to everyone—up until the night someone helps themselves to the one thing he lets himself hold back. Both of them have lessons to learn about worthiness, trust, and second chances.
Finally, I learned that burnout occurs inside a dysfunctional system, and if the dysfunction doesn’t change, the burnout won’t get better. So I put Stellar in a system that couldn’t be more different than the ER—an unbearably touchy-feely adult summer camp, to be specific—and let her heal. I gave her space to learn when she can change her world for the better, and when she needs to step back from a system that wasn’t built to value or protect her.
The end result of my research was a book that broke my own heart. Writing The Ripple Effect shattered my illusions about a lot of things. Though the illusions were never real, their loss was tough to accept.
But despite the grief of losing the world I thought I lived in, the real world turned out to be so, so beautiful—and that, to me, encapsulates the enduring power of romance. Romance is about overcoming the roadblocks between you and the person you were meant to be. It’s about claiming the love and happiness that were always meant to be yours. It’s about breaking your own heart . . . and putting it back together again.
A year after I pitched the book, I handed in the final edits. As I write this essay, another year later, The Ripple Effect will soon be on shelves. I’m drafting the next book and practicing medicine again—this time in a way that lets me care for both my patients and myself.
I wrote a book about something heavy that turned out to be something healing—and it turned out to be a heck of a happy ending.
