Transitions in \"How to Breathe

Transitions in "How to Breathe Underwater"

Orringer, Julie. (2003). How to Breathe Underwater. Knopf.

Author Julie Orringer (born 1973) is American, born in Miami, Florida. Her first book was published in 2003 entitled How to Breathe Underwater. The book contains nine short stories, all thematically tied to the idea of being submerged by some sort of loss and transition; whether that be a loss of a material thing, a friend or relative, or of something more ethereal like a relationship, a lover, or even a friend. Each story is thus thematically tied by the way the characters in the story cope with this loss, and how each of them sinks into a hostile environment that can be both joyous and frightening, and yet learn through adversity to cope with the trauma of the loss and transition - in other words, to breathe in an environment that humans are not meant to survive without external help -- underwater.

In "Pilgrims," for instance, a band of motherless children torment each other on Thanksgiving Day. These children struggle, symbolically Thanksgiving Day is a time in which families come together to feast, children especially are given treats and good things to eat, and the day is considered warm, loving, and above all -- familial for children without mothers, though, Thanksgiving is a new world, a foreign world, in this case Ben and Ella's mother is bedridden with a terminal illness, and Thanksgiving is a macrobiotic dinner at a stranger's house. The lesson in transition is how Ben and Ella learn to cope with the strangeness of both the dinner being so symbolically alien, and having Thanksgiving with people they hardly know. The tragedy is in the shocking event they witness when a simple children's game goes horribly wrong -- a transition from how the children view the world, and what actually happens pragmatically.

Children, while being resilient are, for Orringer, continually trying to figure out how the world works and how they fit into it. As adults, we often romanticize those moments as a child, forgetting just how difficult they can be. Without the experience and wisdom of understanding the complications of life and fallibility of human beings, Ben and Ella for instance are mired in a place in which they have only one way of understanding their world -- returning to the comfort of antagonism.

The loss of a mother comes to us again in "What We Save." In this case, Helena is juxtaposed between understanding what is really happening to her sick mother, while at the same time dealing with her burgeoning adolescence and the rather unsavory advances of the young sons of her mother's own, ironically, childhood boyfriend. Again, Helena initially "sees" the world through a rather childlike haze of hierarchical events: mothers take care of children, not the reverse; people are nice to one another, not implolite and rutting around like an animal. Helena simply cannot understand what makes the boys act this way -- and her own response is to move into a psychological world that takes her into the past, "the way things should be," rather than her future as a sexual being. Her task, then, is learning to "breathe" in an alien environment in which life makes no sense, in which family is topsy-turvy, and one in which she is unable to fully comprehend social stigma and responsibility, and simply pines for childhood again.