New West Book Review
Peggy Shumaker’s “Just Breathe Normally”
By Paula Younger, 5-02-08
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Just Breathe Normally
by Peggy Shumaker
University of Nebraska Press
267 pages, $24.95
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.
Paula Younger is a Denver-based writer and teacher for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop whose work has appeared in The Ledge, Georgetown Review and other publications.
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