Customer Reviews

Just Breathe Normally (American Lives)

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What matters in life directs our responses to events of the moment ...

We never know how we will react to outside stimuli, and when they are life-threatening, our viewpoint and values change ...

Shumaker reflects on life ... what brought her to this point, and how she values her past, and the major influences that taught her how to survive ...

We can see what has become essential to her ... simply being able to recover her life before a careless person wrecked it ...

And what of her past? We also learn how she survived despite pitfalls and hazards ...

With a twist of irony near the end of her narrative, one can only echo her expression of ... " What if ... "

Just Breathe Normally tells of an accident in the context of a larger life. It makes your own life feel fragile, and wonderful and valuable. It makes you want to kiss the person next to you and throw kisses to yourself. It's a celebration of getting through the tough stuff, celebrating the great stuff, character building, trees and swimming and fabulous nieces who will fight off anyone for you, and husbands who care for you and your own inner wild strength. Peggy Shumaker captures in each small chapter a small piece of life like a raindrop in the air. A life falls apart, and the writers puts back the pieces, showing us each piece, love, family, bicycling, Alaska, the ocean, Arizona. We feel the sky opening.

I appreciate the prose poem nature of this memoir, which moves back and forth through Peggy Shumaker's life. If you like a timeline narrative, this is probably not the memoir for you. I admire the way she navigates so many tragedies and manages to swim and breathe under circumstances less than normal. I love her lush language that is never sentimental or murky or clumsy. I was struck by how her own life resonated with mine. Through her story I could see ways to negotiate my own life's telling and nurture the person that I am, and as a writer myself, offer a framework for speaking out. And yet she is so thoroughly Peggy Shumaker, meaning she is not trying to please anybody or make an apology in the telling of her story, but truly trying to understand what has happened to her. Only through such tough story-telling can we perhaps come to understand ourselves. When I read the piece titled Twenty Questions, I thought of the questions I too wanted to ask my own mother, who died of lung cancer at 70. "Given time, would her list of joys have stretched longer than her list of torments?" A question I often ask of my own mother now.

"Death can come at any time. I know that," declares Shumaker in the first line of her book, immediately highlighting the discord between an abstract understanding and the real, unconscious passage from this world to the next. Shumaker, a healthy, active woman, was thrown to the brink of death in a split-second accident on a bike trail, her body mangled and her mind nearly wiped clean. Her memory becomes sporadic; her focus flees; and words, the tools of the trade for a writer, refuse to appear when summoned. As her body struggles to breathe, to pull itself together, to see with both eyes, her brain is busy finding ways to compensate for its traumatized cells. Shumaker tries to fill the gaps in her recollection of the accident with language: "I damn near bought the ranch, headed for the last roundup, kicked the bucket, cashed in my chips...I almost said hey to St. Peter, shuffled off this mortal coil, heard a fly buzz, left the mirror clear."
The struggle to heal forces Shumaker to reevaluate what she calls her "constants"--"reading, writing and the love of my mother's mother"--and to face the tentative and fleeting nature of experience. Suddenly, no recollection is reliable. Multiple versions of the same event do not add up, and her thoughts are spliced apart by the effort it takes to finish them. Thus, Shumaker's narrative is a mosaic of vignettes, some only a couple of sentences long. The pieces don't fit neatly together; the lines of the story are twisted, doubled over, left dangling.

This is a beautiful and insightful memoir. After being injured in a horrific accident, the
author reflects on her life as she recuperates. Between episodes of 'Law and Order' which
she watches incessantly during her recuperation, she peers deeply into her childhood and
adult experiences. I watched 'Law and Order' during a recuperation, too, and I wonder
what it is about this series that helps healing or works to abate the horrible boredom that
accompanies recuperation.

The book is both poignant and brutally honest. Sometimes the writing is so lyrical that I
felt like singing with the words. At other times, it is so brutal that I felt like I'd been hit.
We travel back to the author's Tucson childhood where she survives an abusive and dys-
functional family with resiliency and dignity. She is able to make and keep close friends
and maintain closeness with relatives throughout her life, many of whom are there to sup-
port her after her accident. She describes her loving marriage and her sense of place in
Alaska. She has taught in the University of Alaska's English Department.

I get the sense that the author is a person who does not open up easily but when she
does it is like a flower that blooms suddenly and fully. This is a beautiful book, one that
I will remember for a very long time and that I cherished reading.

A beautiful book...snapshots threaded together with lyrical prose, rich and textured. With soul and heart. You'll dog-ear pages, you'll underline revelations, you'll keep it on your nightstand, you'll want to share it with the world...but only if the world gets their own copy. You won't dare part with yours. And you shouldn't.

Without hype or hysterics, this is a memoir of the perfect form. Deceptively simple in its prose structure, the many emotions, the many stories and the many desires build to a very powerful story. A must read for format and for the story.

Peggy Shumaker is an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. Her poetry background is evident in every carefully sculpted sentence of her memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This book is more than just pretty prose, though. It's a gripping account of one woman's struggle through a potentially life-ending accident and through her chaotic childhood. The wounds are on the body and in the mind. This is a book I will read again and again to decipher how Shumaker makes her magic happen. Clearly, this is a seasoned writer with an intriguing story to tell.

The beginning sets up the hardy Norwegian stock that Shumaker descends from, and, more importantly, the history of women in her family marrying because they were pregnant. In the case of her great-grandmother, a birth resulted in her death, and with her mother, it figuratively ended her life. The impact of this history is felt in Shumaker's decision not to have children and to marry later in life. Sadly, another child almost ended her life; a careless one driving a three-wheeler on the same bicycle path on which she and her husband were cycling.

The title of Just Breathe Normally relates to her mother's lifelong asthma, as well as Shumaker's own problems breathing after her accident. The image of breath ripples throughout. One of my favorite passages is this one about her mother's asthma: "The reason she quit eating. The reason she loved quiet more than her own kids...The reason she didn't want to be here. The reason she left. The reason we buried her breathless." So many passages are lyrical, succinct, and see into the heart of her characters and their situations.

Aside from difficult breathing, Shumaker's life-threatening injuries also resulted in sight and memory problems. This off-kilter feeling is used throughout the book, as well as switching time periods between her accident, present day injuries, and her childhood. This fluctuating time mimics the way memory and breathing work. In trying to piece the details of her accident together to understand it, Shumaker says, "It takes months before my mind can see these nuggets not as separate chunks, but as part of one vein, as story." This sums up her memoir's structure as well, and those little sections add up to a satisfying whole.

The heart of Just Breathe Normally is about Shumaker's unstable childhood with a wonderful, supportive grandmother, and young, immature parents that couldn't stay together. Even though these character types are familiar, each of them manages to surprise throughout. Shumaker is a generous narrator, towards the boy who almost ended her life with his careless driving, towards the mother who neglected her, and towards her absent father. There is no whining about her life or her circumstances, and there isn't a single false note. This is a narrator who knows herself, and her family, and lays it all out for us in rich details and vivid writing.

Her parents' marriage is introduced as My Father's Wives #1; a clever way to set the tone, as well as her father's future marriages. Shumaker describes her absent father as, "We grew around the empty place his absence left in the family. When he was in the house, everybody felt crowded. It felt like having company that hadn't called first." But even the father surprises towards the end of the book.

The section of "Mother's First Words After the Birth" is also powerful:

Because I was her first, no one listened when my mother cried...So I was almost born between floors, my mother clamping shut her thighs, some panicky orderly pinning her shoulders to the gurney. My father, a lanky teenager dreaming of a shovel-head Harley with a suicide clutch, paced...Face to the wall, my mother spoke from far away. "I'm sorry it isn't a boy for you, honey"...Imagine being the woman who would think, just after giving birth for the first time, that. Imagine her saying it out loud to her young man. Imagine her writing it down in the baby book.

Just Breathe Normally is what a book should be: moving and multi-layered. There is a surprise in the ending, which I won't ruin, but after knowing it, the previous passages become even more interesting. Pick up Just Breathe Normally, it just might change the way you breathe, and think.

I thought Peggy has an awesome way of writing..at once a prose poem and then a flowing narrative. I had a hard putting this book down it was very engrossing and powerful. Thank you Peggy for a moving memoir. I really like the poem she quotes at the end of her book--it isn't hers but it very well could have been. I won't quote it here but the poem will stay with me for a long time; I have written it down as not to forget what it says and what it means.

At first glance the simple, short paragraphs trick you into almost missing the very profound thoughts and deep feelings of the writer. This is a marvelous read!