Sorry about the run-on italics... clearly I forgot to close the tag.

A couple more suggestions... anything by Lorrie Moore. Her short stories are brilliant, and the novel Anagrams is also very good. I love Perri Klass, a pediatrician and author, for the way she depicts the emotional tangles of life. Other Women's Children is a great novel about a pediatrician's struggle to sort out her feelings about the tension between her obligations to her patients and her son. The book of short stories Love and Modern Medicine is good, though her earlier collection I Am Having An Adventure has a wider variety of subjects.