Breathless

In this intensely personal account of her adult-onset asthma, acclaimed literary biographer and memoirist Louise DeSalvo explores asthma as both an illness and a response to abuse in our modern age, from environmental crisis to childhood trauma. DeSalvo looks for clues in moments of breathlessness from her own family past: the early sexual abuse that left her gasping in fear, her sister's suicide by hanging. She looks too at the lives of asthmatic writers - Proust, of course, but also Elizabeth Bishop, Olive Schreiner, Michael Ryan, and John Updike - always "in search of images of breathlessness" and asthma's effects on self-image and artistic creation.