“I am adjusting to my shape-shifted body and spirit.  The experience feels like a huge teaching... lesson after lesson, simply opening my hand and heart and receiving—from friends, from nature, from community, from the long dark night, from ancestors, from places and spirits I had not previously been to or met. 

Can a person who has been through a mastectomy really feel as blessed as I feel?”---Elise Peeples

It takes a community:

One Woman's Encounter with Breast Cancer

“You have been impeccably real and naked to the bone with yourself and with us... You have shown us how, when given the chance, a community can be essential to healing and transformation...how a community is transformed by the journey of any one of its own.”                                 ---Elenna Rubin Goodman

Click here to listen to Elise interviewed about When Things Happen to People on KPFA by Kris Welch April 29, 2011.

Readers’ Comments

“At first I thought this was a book about breast cancer ....but although it was breast cancer that Elise Peeples faced, the book was really about people, about community, about stepping forward and into the unknown, about opening to ourselves and to others. It is a book about self respect.
    This is not a sad book, though some things were sad. It was courageous and transformative. It made me recognize that there have been things I had kept to myself that as a result I had also actually kept from myself. “When Things Happen to People” touched me deeply and it changed me. Thank you Elise Peeples for your courage, your openness and your book. “                                     —Phyllis Burt, Petaluma, CA
 
“Reading your account of your surgery was  like being inside of a giant poem where someone was examining courageously the elements of it.  Your letter to your doctor was a stroke of loving genius! There were times when I wished I had written something like that. And thank you (and Meg) for the Rumi quotations. You have inspired me to read him again, but more thoroughly this time.
    Of your tribulation you have made something good, true and beautiful.”
                                                                                          —Peter  Buttros, Natchez, MS

“Elise Peeple’s heartfelt story is a fast read; I couldn’t put it down. But it is also a deeply moving read. By telling her story and the story of her extraordinary support group, Elise not only learned her own lessons, but has turned them into a teaching for others. I don’t need to wait to be in a similar situation for her book to be a best friend and guide -- its lessons apply to all life, not just our trauma times. Thank you, Elise, for your intimate writing and clear honesty.”                        —Meredith Stout, Berkeley, CA