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Lynne Hugo

Baby's Breath Hardcover – September 27, 2000

by Anna Tuttle Villegas (Author), Lynne Hugo (Author)

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What does unconditional love mean? Baby's Breath is a groundbreaking novel about a mother-daughter relationship shattered by a crime so horrific that even in our jaded culture few speak of it without an involuntary shudder. None of us thinks it could happen in our family. Leah Pacey, however, is not allowed the luxury of such denial. For her, the only notion more unthinkable than Alyssa's act is that of abandoning her daughter.

Leah's search for understanding is as halting as our own. She persists only because she must.

As we all must.

Baby's Breath is an unprecedented story of human suffering and human redemption. Sometimes art takes us where we have not imagined, where we do not go of our own accord, and in doing so becomes an instrument of social change. In this meticulously researched work, Hugo and Villegas patiently open our hearts to see beyond the surface of one girl, beyond the surface of sensational headlines. Important literature is rarely easy and this novel is no exception.

Print length

376 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Synergistic Pr
Publication date

September 27, 2000
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0912184132
ISBN-13

978-0912184135
See all details

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A mother-daughter relationship is severely tested in this chilling novel about infanticide by the authors of Swimming Lessons. Single mother Leah Pacey misses her daughter, Alyssa ("Allie"), when Allie goes off to college in Berkeley. But she feels a new lease on life, too, and gives up her real estate job in Philadelphia to paint full-time. Meanwhile, Allie is undergoing a very different transformation. After a brief, fumbling fling, she discovers she is pregnant, but fails to fully acknowledge her condition, even to herself. It is clear from the beginning that there is something very wrong with this reclusive honors student. She sleeps for 12 to 14 hours at a stretch, is adamant about never returning to Philly (although she does end up going home for a brief Thanksgiving visit) and moves into her own apartment but doesn't leave a forwarding address. Allie carries her secret pregnancy to full term and delivers her baby in a BART subway station; then, in a state of delirium, she checks into a filthy rooming house. When Allie's kindly neighbor notices that Allie is missing, she contacts Leah. Allie is arrested when she returns to the BART station where she left her baby, who has since been found dead, and Allie is charged with murder. Leah's and Allie's stories are told in counterpoint, as the novel builds up to the climactic trial scenes. The novel's two central voices are so seamlessly interwoven, one would never suspect that the authors created this moving and disturbing novel via long distance correspondence. The poignancy they achieve allows the reader to overlook an occasional lapse into clich? and stereotype. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A vividly detailed but unpersuasive second novel tries to show why a college freshman denies her pregnancy and then abandons her newborn baby.The writers' territory is that perimeter around A-student Alyssa, 19, and her middle-aged mother Leah, a successful painter, bristling with defense mechanisms and hurt-seeking missiles that surrounds the hearts of so many mothers and daughters in fiction. Leah has long been divorced from Dennis, a self-absorbed artist whose remarriage to a much younger woman has left money as his only link to his daughter, who lives with Leah in Philadelphia. Alyssa is bright and does well in school, but when Leah, who is nursing her dying mother, can't fly out with her when she leaves for her freshman year at Berkeley, Alyssa is deeply hurt. Seeing this abandonment as yet another example of her mother's insensitivity, and already pudgy, she keeps eating, loses her virginity to a campus stud, and then finds herself pregnant. Because the plot demands that she behave in moronic ways and keep mum with Mom, who is sweet and nice and really tries, Alyssa tells nobody. Instead, she moves out of her dorm, lives alone and, when labor starts, heads to a subway restroom, where she gives birth to a baby girl. Disoriented by shock and pain, Alyssa is rescued by a street woman, who gives her temporary shelter in a flophouse in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. But when the baby's body is found in a trashcan, Alyssa is arrested and thrown into the slammer without bail. It's not until Alyssa's trial for murder that she finally begins to draw closer to her distraught mother.What should be a searing tragedy is instead another unconvincing take on mothers and daughters who love each other but are too dumb and defensive to open up until it's almost too late. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"I recommend this book to any woman, mother or not." -- Hattie Boyd(scribesworld.com/reviews (March 2001)

From the Author

After writing our first collaborative novel about friendship between unrelated women, we wanted to explore an even closer female tie. As the mothers of teenage daughters, it seemed natural to us to write about this relationship which we both know so well (better than we wish occasionally, when adolescent attitudes are big enough to warrant their own zip codes). But no matter their lunatic delinquencies and astounding power to annoy, we continue to love our daughters without measure. This unconditional love coupled with a whole spate of headlines in the late nineties about young women our daughters ages started us imagining how the mothers of these girls reacted.

As we investigated, interviewed, read trial transcripts, and visited a jail, the compassion wed initially felt for the mothers of the young women came to encompass the girls who committed this unthinkable crime. That compassion (there but for the grace of God go my daughter and I) will be the source of legislation and social programs to address this problem.

We appreciate reader responses. We write for the same reason that we read widely: to encounter characters skillfully rendered from the inside out.

Babys Breath is a book which we know may elicit reactions from people who dont understand or believe the denial of a young woman who commits a neonaticide. Wed like to be outraged by such disbelief, but at the same time, we realize that a reader who cant accept what our meticulous research taught us is mirroring the first response of others in contemporary culture. However, we think its important not to compound the denial of the young mothers with our own. A reader who says, essentially, this doesnt really happen, has forgotten to look long and hard into the human mirror.

From the Inside Flap

Baby's Breath is compelling, beautiful and rewarding. As it affirms the triumph of love and the possibility of redemption it becomes an instrument of social change.

"Baby's Breath provides insight into how this heartbreaking tragedy might occur. Readers will gain a new perspective of the effect newborn abandonment has on the people directly involved, as well as on society as a whole."
Lilly Riordan, president, Safe Place for Newborns, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Baby's Breath is more like a breath of reality. Alyssa's story of denial is all too familiar a scenario for young mothers desperate to hide an unwanted newborn."
Jodi Brooks, founder, A Secret Safe Place for Newborns, Mobile, Alabama, and reporter for WPMI-TV

"Who will ever understand why a baby dies, simply for being born? We must open our hearts first and then our minds will follow. This book gives us the key to unlocking the heart of anyone who has been a child or a parent."
Gigi Kelly, founder, Baskets for Babies, Inc., Southwestern Pennsylvania.

"I found that once I started reading it was hard to stop. It was as though I was viewing our babies' stories as they unfolded. It is painful but full of truths that need to be shared."
Debi Faris, founder, Garden of Angels, Southern California

"I believe this book will promote a greater awareness of the increasing problem of newborn abandonment and infanticide as well as increase public support for programs and legislation designed to help prevent it."
Ohio State Representative Cheryl Winkler, 34th District

"Baby's Breath confirms what I have known, that women who abandon their babies are troubled, scared and confused. That is why I authored legislation allowing them to leave their newborns at hospitals anonymously, without fear of prosecution for child abandonment. This lets their mothers make a responsible choice and gives the innocent newborns a second chance."
California Assemblyman Ken Maddox, 68th District

About the Author

Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas first collaborated on the novel Swimming Lessons, which was published before they had their first face-to-face meeting. While they were writing it--collaborating by fax, phone and e-mail--the two mothers of college-age children became concerned about the increasing number of news accounts about hidden pregnancies and left-to-die newborns and the then-absence of attempts to understand the phenomenon of neonaticde. That concern led to Baby's Breath.

Hugo is also the author of two collections of poetry, has received fellowships in poetry and prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Ohio Arts Council, and is with the latter's Artists in Education program. A resident of Ohio, she is a licensed psychotherapist and former clinical director of a residential treatment center for adolescents.

Villegas' debut novel, All We Know of Heaven, was published in 1997 and translated into 10 languages. Her essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. A fifth-generation Californian, she lives in the Central Valley and has taught college and university English for the past 25 years.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Synergistic Pr; 1st edition (September 27, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 376 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0912184132
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0912184135
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

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Lynne Hugo

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Lynne Hugo is an American author whose roots are in New England. A National Endowment For The Arts Fellowship recipient, she has also received repeat individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her publications include ten novels, as well as a memoir, Where the Trail Grows Faint, which won the Riverteeth Creative Nonfiction Book Prize. An eleventh novel, The Language of Kin, will be published in July '23. She has also published two books of poetry and a children’s book. She lives with her husband, a photographer, in the Midwest. The couple have two children, three grandchildren, and a yellow Labrador retriever who excels at barking, playing tennis ball shortstop, and terrorizing squirrels.

Ms. Hugo has taught creative writing to hundreds of schoolchildren through the Ohio Arts Council’s renowned Arts in Education program. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College, and a Master’s from Miami University.

When an editor asked her to describe herself as a writer, she responded:

"I write in black Wal-Mart capri sweatpants. They don't start out as capris, but I routinely shrink them in the drier by accident. And I always buy black because it doesn't show where I've wiped the chocolate off my hands. Now that my son and daughter are grown, my previous high grade of 'below average' in Domestic Achievement has dropped somewhat. But I'm less guilty about it now. I lose myself in crafting language by a window with birdfeeders hanging in the branches of a Chinese elm towering over the house. When I come up for air, I hike by the ponds and along the river in a nearby forest with my beloved Lab. My husband, with whom I planted that elm as a bare root sapling, joins us when he can."

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Elizabeth B. Barkley

Baby's Breath: Exploring the Mother-Daughter Bond

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 29, 2000

By now most readers probably know that Baby's Breath is about neonaticide. Grappling with that issue-in reality or in fiction-can never be a simple, black and white experience. To their credit, as writers and as mothers, Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas, never pretend it is. That's what makes this book, their second collaboration, so satisfying to read. They approach their subject from a multiplicity of perspectives: as mothers, as literary artists, as women trying to fathom how anyone would abandon a baby at birth.
When Hugo and Villegas began exploring the issue of neonaticide as a theme for their work, they found few writers before them who had been willing to tackle what seemed a taboo topic. The more they delved, the more resources they found to help them understand this phenomenon. The list of 25 works consulted at the end of the novel includes news reports of young mothers abandoning their children, explorations of postpartum depression and personality abnormalities, and court briefs and trial transcripts detailing cases paralleling Alyssa's in Baby's Breath. Clearly the authors have done their homework. But good research does not necessarily make a good novel. What the authors bring to this work is what made their first novel, Swimming Lessons, so compelling: insight into life and relationships and a literary style that keeps the reader engaged in a book dealing with a subject difficult to face.
In the early pages of the book we are introduced to Alyssa, a college freshman at Berkeley, who has gone to college about as far away as she can from her father and her mother, Leah, divorced in Philadelphia. The opening chapters, where we are given background on Alyssa's childhood and her parents' divorce, moved a little slowly for me, but being a fan of Swimming Lessons, I knew these pages were a necessary prelude to what Hugo and Villegas shine at: seamless, literary writing. I wasn't disappointed.
From two perspectives, daughter and mother miles apart, we watch as Alyssa sinks into isolation and denial, and Leah begins to find herself as she buries a failed marriage and is re-born as a successful artist. It is in the middle chapters, when we begin to understand what Alyssa has done-abandoned her baby in a public restroom-that we, along with Allie and Leah, begin the journey to understand "why."
This is not only Alyssa's story, it is also Leah's-the mother who, when she arrives in California, initially denies her daughter's act because admitting it would mean admitting a less-than-perfect mother-daughter relationship. It is Allie's neighbor Clara, a mother herself, who gently helps Leah begin to understand that Allie could be guilty of the crime, because, although Leah was unaware of it, Alyssa really had been pregnant.
"Clara, she'd have come to me"-Leah's defensive response is the beginning of a deeper relationship between mother and daughter that is as much the subject of the book as the baby's abandonment.
Through therapy sessions in prison where Alyssa comes to grips with her past and her self, through court testimony, and through Clara, friend now to both mother and daughter, Alyssa and Leah grow to understand not only what happened and possibly why it happened but also how precious the mother-daughter bond is. On an opening page of this book, Hugo and Villegas write: "Belief is the lifeblood of love," dedicating the novel to their mothers "who gave us theirs" and to their children "to whom we give ours." In the final pages of the book, as we listen to the verdict of the jury sitting in judgment on Alyssa's actions, we hear Hugo's and Villegas' dedication translated to the lives of another mother and daughter. In Leah's words to Allie we see that out of suffering can come redemption and that belief and love are inseparable: "'We'll make it, Allie. We'll make it.'"

7 people found this helpful

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angelina forsberg

holding my breath

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 1, 2000

As an avid reader, a 20 year old daughter of a single mother, and a womyn's studies major, I rarely find fiction that I relate to specifically and strongly. There are three ways in which this book touched me immensely. The first thing that choked my throat was simply the relationship between mother and daughter. I've often encountered the prejudices from christian suburbanites and nuclear families because I was raised without a father. Rarely in our popular media does one find a true, unsteriotypical portrayal of the strong bond between a family like this of two womyn. The love spiked with intense pain resonates from both characters with such reality that by the second chapter I was crying simply from reading my experiences in someone else's voice. The tragedy of adulthood, the separation angst of moving to college, and the deliberate severing of emotional ties in trying to be an individual are all experiences many of us go through and usually don't talk about. The second thing that I reacted to is the natural mix of confusion, animosity, and conformity that most young womyn, especially once in college or out of the houses we were raised in experience. Without the emotional backbone of parents and family, in a new place, 'fitting in' is an emotional, physical, and spiritual struggle. Having problems with weight, not being blonde or rich, and not knowing one's social 'place' leads some to finding themselves, and others to try and create the self others want them to be. This tying in to the third and most poignant point. Pregnancy. Mass media has been depicting for years the number of cases where newborns are found dead or dying, abandoned after birth. How easy it was, then, to look and judge this as the most heinous crime of humanity. Though we have no problem blaming most murders on insanity, when a girl abandons her child the media depict the lowest form of evil. This book delves into the unexpressed psychosis of the mind behind the act. Striving to fit into society, please parents and friends, and finding her sexual self, our heroine does find herself in one of the darkest places imaginable, yet there is a new light shed on the circumstances. This book is not only a movement in the way of womyn, it is also a perfect and painfully beautiful portrayal of two womyn's minds in the mix of contemporary society's rules and regulations. I thank Anna Villegas and Lynne Hugo for taking this risk and great step forward.

3 people found this helpful

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Barb Eshbaugh

Baby's Breath

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 10, 2001

A compelling, believable novel covering a subject seen widely in newsmedia but seldom in jounalism. I could not put the book down and wept in sympathy for the confused woman who makes a poor choice. It is a study of mother/daughter unconditional love which is tested to the ultimate degree. Should be a book required for Women's Issues Courses in colleges and universities.

4 people found this helpful

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Carolyn M. Enevoldsen

Great book, great service!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 12, 2008

I have never been unhappy with Amazon's service! Once again, they have done a great job!

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