Just Breathe Normally

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.

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

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.

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 ... "