About this item
Deanna Fei was just five-and-a-half months pregnant when she inexplicably went into labor. Minutes later, she met her tiny baby who clung to life support inside a glass box. Fei was forced to confront terrifying questions: How to be the mother of a child she could lose at any moment. Whether her daughter would survive another day--and whether she should. But as she watched her daughter fight for her life, Fei discovered the power of the mother-child bond at its most elemental.A year after she brought her daughter home from the hospital, the CEO of AOL--her husband's employer--blamed the beautiful, miraculously healthy little girl for a cut in employee benefits and attached a price tag to her life, using a phrase, "distressed babies," that set off a national firestorm.Girl in Glass is the riveting story of one child's harrowing journey and a powerful distillation of parenthood. With incandescent prose and an unflinching eye, Fei explores the value of a human life: from the spreadsheets wielded by cost-cutting executives to the insidious notions of risk surrounding modern pregnancy; from the wondrous history of medical innovation in the care of premature infants to contemporary analyses of what their lives are worth; and finally, to the depths of her own struggle to make sense of her daughter's arrival in the world. Above all, Girl in Glass is a luminous testament to how love takes hold when a birth defies our fundamental beliefs about how life is supposed to begin.
About the Author
Deanna Fei is the author of the new memoir GIRL IN GLASS (Bloomsbury) , hailed as 'extraordinarily beautiful' by NPR and 'an impassioned, important book' by the Washington Post. GIRL IN GLASS was recently featured on PBS NewsHour, Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC, and NPR's All Things Considered, among other outlets. In 2014, Fei's essay, 'My Baby and AOL's Bottom Line,' went viral worldwide and sparked national conversations about medical privacy, corporate accounting, employer-sponsored health care, and what a human life is worth. She appeared on NBC's the Today show, the CBS Evening News, CNN's Erin Burnett Show, MSNBC's News Nation, and NPR's Here and Now to discuss her decision to speak about her 'distressed baby. ' Fei currently works with March of Dimes to help raise awareness of the true tolls of prematurity and Graham's Foundation to help advocate for parents of premature babies. She recently founded OurDistressedBabies. org, a forum where people can share their own stories to raise awareness of the need for more compassion and justice in our healthcare system. Fei is also the author of the award-winning novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin, 2010) . She was born in Flushing, New York, and graduated from Amherst College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, TIME, Fortune, Slate, The Millions, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. Fei has taught and counseled at-risk youth through the Asian American Writers' Workshop, CASES, and New York City public schools. She regularly gives talks at forums such as the Museum of Chinese in America, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference, the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest, and schools and universities nationwide. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
