Fine print: I bought this book expecting to like it because I like “Blaze.” What I’m reading now: “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” by Ann Brashares.
One moment you’re enjoying Alaska life with your husband, biking on a path safely separated from motor traffic. Next moment a kid on an ATV barrels around a blind corner and almost kills you both. You’re so injured you don’t even remember the accident and must listen over and over again while your husband tells you how strangers held your head and helped save your life.
One moment you’re a sixteen year old getting the younger siblings ready for school. Next moment, your mom is dead and your dad’s crazy second wife won’t let you eat an orange from a bowl on the kitchen counter.
Like Heather Lende, another beloved Alaska writer who got struck while riding her bicycle, Peggy Shumaker, a professor emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, faced a grueling recovery after an accident. Lucky for us readers, her memoir “Just Breathe Normally” keeps the grueling moments to snapshots and drifts between recovery and prose poems about Shumaker’s family history. Like with her book of sensual poems “Blaze,” this “poemoir” is full of lyrical gems, humorous surprises, poignant insights and also pain.
The snippets look unflinchingly (and sometimes flinchingly) at childhood, the present and all that in between. The portrait of her dysfunctional family is unsentimental toward her parents yet still tender: These are my parents, this is what I got and how we dealt, I’ll tell you how I judged them then and now let you judge. Not bitter. Well, not too much.
The nonlinear telling means that some scenes a reader might expect aren’t included, but the moments we do get often inform how the more standard-fare incidents would happen. A couple of times, I’m a little lost and don’t know how we got from there to here, but mostly the shifts in time and place are nice and clear and understandable and usually the vignettes can stand alone enough or are beautiful enough to make up from any confusion.
This could have been a memoir that dwelled on snippy medical staff, unfairness (like her not being able to drive while the boy who hit her can) or growing up too soon, but it is all told poetically and with such lyrical language that it rises above each of these things (and also sits on my nightstand for a week while I indulge in page-turning fiction). The beauty of the language and the wisdom in the vignettes make up for the fact that “Just Breathe Normally” brings up a lot of memories about time spent in hospitals and my grandparents’ death, moments I don’t want to revisit.
The picture on the book flap is a stock author photo from before the accident so you missed what I and others saw at a reading at Title Wave in September. Her eye was still healing and partially closed – the slight disfiguration made her story so much more real. This isn’t fiction, this isn’t an academic musing on pain, this is something that changed her being in ways we can see, as well as read about.
University of Nebraska Press, $24.95, 267 pages. Part of the American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff
The story is like the song we all know about the lady and the fly, and it is just as catchy. Maybe more so. Only it has Alaska-Pacific Northwest animals like trout, salmon, otter and whales. The illustrations by Reynold Ruffins are bright and fun and you can watch the lady’s belly grow and grow until she swallows the ocean. “What a commotion! She swallowed the ocean!”
