About the author

When she was six years old, Susan Annah Currie spent fifteen months as a patient in the Preventorium Hospital in Magee, Mississippi, where children were allowed visits from parents only twice a month, and adhered to a strict daily routine, called “the Fresh Air Method”.

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Susan is a native Mississippian, born in Jackson in 1953. She obtained a B.A. in English from Belhaven College, and attended graduate school for English Literature at the University of Mississippi.  In 1979, she moved to Ithaca, New York, and obtained a Masters in Library Science from the University of Buffalo. She was an academic librarian for close to thirty years, including Cornell University and SUNY Binghamton University Libraries. In 2009, she was chosen to be the director of the historic Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, NY. 

In 2023, she was elected to the Tompkins County Legislature. 

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Ironically, she now lives less than ten miles away from what was once a Preventorium. The Cayuga Nature Center, just outside Ithaca, New York opened in 1939 as the Cayuga Preventorium with assistance from the WPA  and existed for twenty-one years.

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This memoir has been living and breathing inside of her since 1960.