Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?

I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships. We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us. Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.