Near Breathing

Memoir of a Difficult Birth

by Kathryn Rhett

1997 / $24.95 Cloth / 215 pages
ISBN 0-8207-0277-3

1997 / $16.95 Paper / 215 pages
ISBN 0-8207-0278-1

Book Information

Near Breathing is the story of a difficult and transformative birth experience. Rather than the "perfect birth" the author can later imagine, she and her husband instead experience the near-death of their infant daughter. As the baby is attended by a bewildering team of specialists in the neonatal intensive care unit, attached to a respirator and other machines, Kathryn Rhett finds that she is forced to confront her own ideas about bravery and beauty, family and love. Near Breathing is a love letter, from a mother to the daughter she nearly lost.

Author Information

KATHRYN RHETT teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, fiction writer Fred Leebron, and their two children. She is also the editor of Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis.

"Kathryn Rhett carried a healthy baby girl to term, but during delivery something went seriously wrong-the baby aspirated poisonous meconium, and for days afterward her little life hung in the balance. Rhett's Near Breathing is a wry, unflinching and exquisite account of those twilight days-a fearlessly unsentimental evocation of a time any parent might wish to forget in a book we will long remember." -BARBARA JONES, VOGUE

"A gripping book-brilliantly written-and you will be riveted by the suspense and drama. Every mother should read it. Every father, too. Near Breathing is the title of this stunning memoir. Near breathing will describe you reading it." -THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER