"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." . . . "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." . "Biography" . . . "Breathless : an asthma journal" . . . . . . . .