One out of ninety-eight million people are attacked by a shark. The author was one of them. In early May of 2007, Peller Marion was savaged and nearly killed by an eighteen-foot, three-thousand-pound tiger shark in the waters off Kihei, Maui. After it occurred, this shark attack was a human-interest story that generated national and international attention and played out publicly on television and in newspapers. But her recovery, both physical and emotional, has been a very private process-one she chronicles in Shark Attack and Other Mishaps. This is a story about how she survived, the ordeal she went through, and how it revealed other life changing events. The opening narrative, from which the title is taken, establishes the central preoccupations: the difficulty of recognizing one's mortality, the yearning to make sense out of the puzzle pieces of one's life, and the poignancy and yearnings of a long-time marriage.