Memoir recalls crisis, healing

“Dancing was freedom,” recalls Valerie Carpenter in her memoir co-authored with Mark Osmun, a former Honolulu Advertiser reporter and Carpenter’s Langley High School classmate in Virginia.

So what’s a dancer to do when she can no longer move?

Everything came to a halt for Carpenter in March 2000 when she fell out of a hotel bed and was paralyzed from the neck down.

A psychotherapist who had specialized in working with deaf youth, she worked hard to heal herself with intensive physical therapy.

She reconnected with a high school and college friend, John Carpenter, a businessman and conservatory pianist. They married, and, still walking with a cane, she found work at a school for deaf children. Then came a huge setback: In 2007 a bag fell from an airplane overhead bin onto Valerie’s head, re-injuring her spinal cord.

Throughout “Dancer,” Osmun, author of “The Honolulu Marathon” and the novel “Marley’s Ghost,” writes with clear-eyed empathy, deftly inserting scenes from Carpenter’s past while sustaining the story’s forward momentum.

Before he signed on to write the book, Osmun had asked Carpenter what she wanted to get from publishing her story. “Without hesitation she said that if the book could help even one other person in a similar situation, then … it would be worth it.”

At the book’s end Carpenter reaffirms that feeling and emphasizes that a positive attitude has been her key to healing.

Anyone who’s dealt with disabling injuries or illness will find comfort and hope — and help — in “Dancer.”