Girl in Glass

A brave and inspiring memoir of Fei’s daughter's extremely premature birth and the controversy that erupted when AOL’s CEO blamed her “distressed baby” for a cut in employee benefits.

In October 2012 Deanna Fei was just five months pregnant when she suddenly and 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 each day-and whether she should. But as she watched her indomitable daughter fight for her life, Fei discovered the power of the mother-child bond at its most elemental.

In February 2014, a year after her daughter came home from the hospital, the beautiful, miraculously healthy little girl was blamed by CEO Tim Armstrong for a cut in AOL employee benefits. This egregious violation of privacy enabled the colleagues of Fei's husband to attach a price tag to their daughter's care; sparked intense debates across national media; and eventually propelled Fei to come forward to restore the humanity of a child who had overcome so much, only to be scapegoated as a drag on the company bottom line.

In Girl in Glass-a searing, luminous portrait of her daughter's harrowing journey and her own struggles and joys as a mother-Fei underscores the gross injustice of putting anyone on the defensive for suffering a medical crisis; humanizes the perilous state of individual privacy versus corporate indifference; and reflects on the value of a human life. But Girl in Glass is most of all a testament to the fierceness and endurance of parental love.

Deanna Fei is the author of the novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, 2010 Best Book by the Chinese American Librarians’ Association, and winner of Late Night Library’s “Debut-litzer” Prize. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Millions, Huffington Post, and other publications. Deanna lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

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