Amy Koppelman Boeken

Now a major motion picture starring Amanda Seyfried. A Mouthful of Air is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a mother torn between a superabundance of love for her family and the depression and doubt that frequently weighs her down. Julie Davis seemingly has it all -- an attentive husband, a healthy son about to celebrate his first birthday, a posh apartment with live-in help in a desirable building on Manhattan's Upper West Side -- but crushing postpartum depression transforms even small talk and mundane questions into exchanges fraught with imagined consequence. Over the course of three winter days in late-1997, Julie attempts to present a steady face of ordinariness and joy, boiling peaches for her son's first birthday, attending a basketball game with her husband, and visiting her mother. When an annual doctor's check-up reveals a startling discovery, Julie is forced to make difficult decisions that will threaten the precarious balance she's fought so hard to achieve. With propulsive, poetic prose, Amy Koppelman delivers a frank and elegiac portrayal of Julie's internalized struggle in this heartbreakingly powerful statement on motherhood, family, and survival.

Now a major motion picture starring Amanda Seyfried, adapted and directed by Amy Koppelman. Compared to seminal feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, A Mouthful of Air is a powerful, tragic statement on motherhood, family, and survival. A Mouthful of Air is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of Julie Davis, a young wife and mother torn between the love she feels for her family and the voice in her head that insists they'd be better off without her. We meet Julie several weeks after her suicide attempt, on the eve of her son's first birthday. Grateful to be alive, Julie tries her best to appreciate every moment--"this tree, that passing car, the pretzel guy up ahead on the corner. She has, for whatever reason, been given a second chance"--but her emotional demons are unrelenting, and she is slowly and quietly losing the battle. Within the narrative of A Mouthful of Air is an argument about the nature of depression--its causes, cures, and the price it exacts from its victims. With spare, elegant prose, this brutally honest portrayal of family and self illuminates the power and complexity of the human psyche. Originally published in 2003, A Mouthful of Air now includes an afterword by author Adrienne Miller.