Every Last Breath

"Joanne Jacobson's Every Last Breath "follows" two chronic illnesses that grew unexpectedly intertwined when her writing about her mother's respiratory illness was interrupted by her own diagnosis with a rare blood disorder. Rejecting the fixed, retrospective point of view and the forward-moving narrative trajectory of conventional memoir, the essays of Every Last Breath immerse the reader in the emotionally raw present of illness-confronting potentially fatal illness and "end-of-life" while both are still, emphatically, life"--