Student’s memoir, ‘Breathing for a Living,’ set for summer publication

Laura Rothenberg, a Brown junior who has cystic fibrosis, has just finished her memoir, "Breathing for a Living," which is to be published this summer. Rothenberg underwent a lung transplant, but her body is rejecting the organ. She has left Brown to return home to New York, where she is receiving Hospice care.

by Kristen Cole

When Laura Rothenberg’s friend died a few months before graduating from college, the young woman’s mother told Rothenberg she would have to be a survivor for all her friends with cystic fibrosis who did not make it.

Rothenberg recalled those weighty words in her essay “Looking Back on Life,” written for a creative nonfiction course at Brown three years ago. Such personal accounts of her daily struggle to live a life compromised by cystic fibrosis will soon become a book to be published in July.

But several weeks ago, the Brown junior who was born with the genetic disease that has preyed upon her lungs made a list of people to whom she wants to say goodbye, said boyfriend Bryan Doerries.

Nearly without interruption, Rothenberg’s body has fought the lung transplant she received 18 months ago, and she now breathes with the assistance of a ventilator. Recently she directed her doctors not to resuscitate her, and is in Hospice care at home in New York City. She planned to celebrate her 22^nd birthday Feb. 3 with a small party of close friends.

Although she has not graduated from Brown, Rothenberg has satisfied another goal. She recently finished the final edits of her book and sent it to Hyperion Press, the publisher, said Doerries. “Breathing for a Living” is a memoir that opens with her decision to accept a lung transplant.

“This book is … a very powerful message,” said Doerries, 26, who met Rothenberg years ago in a young writers workshop at the University of Virginia. “It’s taking you into the subjective process of someone thrown every imaginable torture and who continues to transcend.”

Last week, although she was confined to her bed for most of the day, Rothenberg rose nightly to join groups of friends around the dinner table. And, when some Brown students visited, “it was like being on the Green, with someone playing the guitar,” said Doerries.

A few years ago, Rothenberg told the George Street Journal that she entered college knowing it was a dangerous environment for her because it was rife with germs that would sometimes send her to the hospital with pneumonia. At times, she carried a backpack that connected her to a feeding tube, Doerries said.

“It would be great if Brown students could understand how very much she wanted to be one of them,” said Doerries last week by phone from the apartment he shares with Rothenberg.

As Rothenberg wrote on the eve of her 19^th birthday in “Looking Back on Life”: “I’m on my way back to the dorm now – jeans, fuzzy Patagonia jacket, hat to keep my wet hair protected. I made it through my [swim] laps – I didn’t think at points that I would, but I did. Yup, just the typical college student about to have her birthday away from home for the first time.”

"My So-Called Lungs"

For two years, Laura Rothenberg kept an audio diary of her battle with cystic fibrosis as part of a radio documentary project called Radio Diaries. Her 15 hours of tapes were edited by producer Joe Richman into a 22-minute piece called "My So-Called Lungs," which aired on NPR's "All Things Considered" last Aug. 5. You can read the transcript or listen to the audio at www.radiodiaries.org.