WESTON — Heather Frimmer loves her job.
The Weston resident is a radiologist specializing in breast and emergency room imaging at Main Street Radiology in Queens, N.Y. Frimmer, 47, loves that she makes a difference in people’s lives. She loves that she can look at images and use them to help solve medical problems.
“I love that sense of meaning and being able to figure out a puzzle,” Frimmer said.
But, as meaningful as her job is, she said, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity. Hoping to exercise those muscles, she took a class with the Westport Writers’ Workshop. Her teacher saw potential and said Frimmer should try writing a novel. Skeptical at first, Frimmer decided to give it a shot.
It turned out that a lot of what she loved about medicine translated to writing, with a few variations.
“I think that writing a novel also has that puzzle aspect (that radiology has),” Frimmer said. “But the writing is much more creative. I need to make up a story on my own. I start with a blank page.”
In 2018, she published her first book, “Bedside Manners,” about a woman diagnosed with breast cancer and her medical student daughter. “I was hooked,” Frimmer said. “I couldn’t stop writing.”
Her second book, “Better to Trust” comes out on Sept. 21. Once again Frimmer has drawn on her day job for inspiration.
The new book was inspired by an acquaintance who successfully performed a minor surgery on a family member. But Frimmer’s book imagines a scenario in which a surgery by a relative doesn’t go as planned, and unearths dark secrets.
Frimmer said she likes mining the medical field for creative inspiration, and feels these kinds of books have a built-in appeal.
“I feel that people have this hunger to see the inner workings of the medical world ,because it can be kind of opaque,” she said.
She also likes blending these medical tales with complex, messy family stories — stories about “family ties, and how those ties get tangled,” Frimmer said. Those are the kinds of books she likes to read, she said, and she finds them equally fun to write.
Though Frimmer said finding things to write about isn’t necessarily an obstacle, finding the time to write about them can be. In addition to her work as radiologist, Frimmer is the mother of two children, aged 13 and 15.
On days when she isn’t working at her full-time job, she said she tries to dedicate as much time as possible to writing.
“I write in small chunks of time throughout the day,” Frimmer said.
She wakes up early, usually between 5:30 and 6 a.m., and writes as much as she can in those wee hours. She jots down ideas she gets while taking walks, driving or reading other people’s books.
“I also don’t watch TV, so whatever free time I have, I’m either reading, writing or walking,” Frimmer said.
With her second novel about to be released, Frimmer is already at work on a third. This one is about an obstetrician and a patient who has a traumatic birth experience. Though she doesn’t see herself leaving medicine any time soon (“Most writers must have day jobs because writing doesn’t pay so well,” Frimmer explained), she has embraced the world of fiction.
“I don’t mind investing the time to get involved in a world and getting to know the characters,” she said.
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