"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"--