Every Last Breath

Joanne Jacobson is the author of Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams (1992) and Hunger Artist: A Suburban Childhood (2007). Her critical essays and memoirs have appeared in such publications as Bellevue Literary Review, New England Review, Fourth Genre, and The Nation and her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

"Every Last Breath is a beautiful and brave exploration of the ephemerality of the body, the breath, and the world. It makes a valuable contribution to the literature of grief and the growing body of work that is focused on the intersection between body and belief." -Jennifer Sinor, author of Ordinary Trauma and Letters Like the Day "Every Last Breath is a book in which every last word illuminates the mutable, mortal body we singly inhabit and commonly share. It speaks deeply to the human experience of incremental time and ongoing, subtle, threshold-crossing change. It is impossible to overstate the beauty and intelligence that imbues Joanne Jacobson's meditation on the ecstatic and perishable condition of our lives." -William Merrill Decker, author of Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood "In this brilliant memoir, so gorgeously written, so richly intelligent, and so achingly heartfelt, Jacobson tells the stories of two illnesses, a mother's and a daughter's, one of breath and one of blood. Jacobson plunges all the way down (to borrow from Emily Dickinson) to 'Where the Meanings are.' With its lyrical compression and unguarded honesty, Every Last Breath is a knock-out." -Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows "Both memoir and biography, this book tells the interrelated stories of two Jewish-American women, mother and daughter, as their failing bodies confront them with their mortality. Jacobson's work is heart-wrenching without being maudlin. The respective illnesses are keenly observed. Family relationships are sweet and brutal. The body, the human body in its exquisite frailty, recurs as an object of reflection." -Scott Abbott, author of Immortal for Quite Some Time