The act of breathing is richly symbolic in ways that author Gayle Brandeis finds useful for her new essay collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. It neatly illustrates the body’s permeability: We pull the outside world into us — oxygen, pollutants, whatever else — change it, and force it back out, underlining our vulnerability but also our capacity for transformation. Like creativity, breathing is both a conscious choice and involuntary function. Breath is a potent metaphor, she tells us, “because it exists right at the nexus of body and mind.”
The book is thematically arranged according to different modes of breathing (“Quiet Breathing,” “Painful Breathing,” etc.). Brandeis, a UNR creative writing instructor, has led the sort of episodic, often-challenging life that can nutrify a gutsy essayist: bouts of debilitating disease, heartbreak, and, most intensely, a mother whose operatic swells of mental illness ended in suicide. The wrenching “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” juxtaposes her child’s birth with her mother’s death just days later. “Joy” is typical of her method: In writing about her mother’s favorite perfume, Brandeis braids memory and experience with snatches of science and history into a complex meditation on grief and the power of the senses. Despite the foregoing, this book is not a downer — there’s a revitalizing warmth to “Shadow Son,” in which a young man can’t accept that Brandeis isn’t his birth mother. There are top notes of empathy and social justice throughout.
The book’s last essay describes how a scary bout of COVID unplugged Brandeis’ ability to write — which, in one of Drawing Breath’s most surprising turns, she’s okay with. “The world doesn’t need more of my voice,” she says. Maybe it needs something else from her: the pay-it-forward generosity to “empower other voices.” It’s as if everything that’s come before has finally allowed her to breathe easy.
Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss
by Gayle Brandeis
226 pages, $18.95
Overcup Press