So Winger has tried to transfer some of her own fame to Rothenberg’s memoir. The day after her “Today Show” plug, she says, several book chains sold out of Breathing for a Living.
She’s also turned her attention to trying to get the book assigned in various high schools and colleges, including Harvard.
Winger says Rothenberg’s memoir would supply much-needed variety to the one-track studies of some students, especially those on the pre-med track.
“The last thing that happens is you read literature, and if you do read literature...you read it with a highlighting pen in hand,” she says. “You hand a guy who’s planning on being a doctor The Death of Ivan Ilych and let him read some works by doctors like William Carlos Williams or Chekhov and it changes their perspective.”
This would not be Winger’s first experience bringing complex questions to Cambridge—in the fall of 1999, she spent a term pushing Harvard undergraduates to read and reflect beyond their routine studies. As a teaching fellow in General Education 105: “The Literature of Social Reflection,” taught by Agee Professor of Social Ethics Robert Coles ’50, Winger strove to relate her stardom to students’ contemplation of moral and social issues. It is an experience that she says she’d gladly take on again if the much-loved course returns to the registrar’s listings.
“I would, much to the dismay of many students,” Winger kids. “I was told I was a bit of a hardass...A lot of people refer to [Gen Ed 105] as a gut, but I felt differently about it.”
Coles—who fondly recalls his former TF’s “tremendous enthusiasm and intelligence”—stopped teaching the course two years ago, but echoes Winger’s conviction that Breathing for a Living belongs on a Harvard syllabus.
“We would have used it,” Coles says. “Because when you connect a book like that to a lot of college students that’s something that goes a little bit beyond the reading list...Like all lives, there are moments where you’re given some pause, and this book gives you a lot of moral and psychological pause.”
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.