Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan Nonfiction 2018 Random House Finished on September 14, 2018 Rating: 5/5 (Excellent!) Publisher's Blurb: In "I Don't Know," Corrigan wrestles to make peace with uncertainty, whether it's over expected invitations that never come or a friend's agonizing infertility. In "No," she admires her mother's ability to set boundaries, her liberating willingness to be unpopular. In "Tell Me More," she learns something important about listening from a facialist named Tish. And in "I Was Wrong," she comes clean about her disastrous role in a family fight--and explains why saying sorry may not be enough. With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand "the thing behind the thing," Corrigan swings in this insightful book between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss. In channeling the characteristically streetwise, ever-relatable voice that has defined Corrigan's work, Tell Me More is a meaningful, touching take on the power of the right words at the right moment to change everything.
What a treasure! I have and will continue to read anything Kelly Corrigan publishes. I love her honest (and at times, often brutal) examination of life, death, love and family. I wish I knew her personally, as her anecdotes and feelings are so relatable. I can imagine sitting across from her, enjoying a cup of coffee and conversation, both of us laughing and crying over life's joys and heartaches. Having watched so many of her videos, I was able to hear her voice, imagining it breaking with emotion, as I read each page. Once in a blue moon, I read a book that touches me so deeply that I am inspired to write a fan letter. This is one of those books and I couldn't have loved it more. I'm very happy that I bought it in hardcover. It's a keeper. Just a couple of favorite passages. (I could have easily marked the entire book.):
Every conversation fell into the same pattern. Cancer was The Enemy, treatment was A Journey, and I was A Hero whose responsibility was to weather the shipwrecks and beat back the sea monsters, returning from the odyssey changed and better. It was uncanny how many people said one or more of these three things: You’re so brave. Was it in your family? and What a wake-up call.
and
I love you.The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying.Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel.The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.
Click here for more of my posts about Kelly and her books.
Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan Memoir 2014 Ballantine Books (imprint of Random House) Finished on 11/21/13 Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Publisher’s Blurb: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place comes a new memoir that examinees the bond—sometimes nourishing, sometimes exasperating, occasionally divine—between mothers and daughters. When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom—with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism—would forever remain her father’s understudy. After college, Kelly took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting. But soon after savings dwindled, and she realized she needed a job. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, she suddenly heard her mother’s voice everywhere, nudging and advising, cautioning and direction, escorting her through a terrain as foreign as any she had ever trekked. This is a book about the differences between travel and life experience, stepping out and stepping up, fathers and mothers. But mostly it’s about who you admire and why, and how that changes over time. I discovered Kelly Corrigan’s early prose several years ago when I stumbled upon her website (Circus of Cancer), while scouring the Internet for information about my youngest brother’s cancer. Shortly thereafter, I got an ARC of The Middle Place and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Kelly was the author. I found myself completely absorbed in this memoir, marking passages and nodding my head in agreement. A few years later, I did the exact same thing with Kelly’s poignant new book, Lift, which I read twice in two weeks. I became a big fan and started following Corrigan’s blog and watching her YouTube videos, eager for a new book to add to my collection. I have now read all three of Kelly Corrigan’s memoirs and they each have spoken to me about various aspects of my own life. I can hear her voice in my head as I read and, as with her YouTube clips, her memoirs make me laugh out loud in one instant and bring tears to my eyes in another. As her editor states in her letter to readers at the beginning of the ARC for Glitter and Glue:
Here’s the thing about Kelly Corrigan: You can’t read her books without wanting to be her best friend. It’s just that simple. As soon as you turn this page, you’ll see what I mean. It’s like the best of all magic tricks, the way she puts readers under her spell, and it doesn’t take long. One minute, you’re starting a new book, and the next, it’s as if you’re sitting across the table from the author, listening to her tell her story over a cup of coffee.
I wish I lived in Manhattan Beach, California. Not only do I have family there (and it’s on the beach!), but I could have had the chance to meet Kelly today at Pages A Bookstore (which is less than half a mile from my aunt’s house!) where Kelly was having a book signing. This past week, she was at The Tattered Cover in Denver (almost close enough!) and Santaluz Country Club in San Diego (where I have more family and friends). Next month she'll be in Dallas (at the Highland United Methodist Church), which is where my daughter lives. Somehow, I doubt she’ll be in Nebraska anytime soon. But back to the new book, which I actually read three months ago. (Yes, I am still trying to catch-up…) I was hooked from the first page, reading slowly, savoring it as long as possible. As a daughter, and also the mother of a grown daughter, I enjoyed all the passages about Kelly and her mom, once again finding myself nodding in agreement as I read. The majority of the memoir focuses on Kelly’s time as a nanny to a family in Australia and while I enjoyed that part of the narrative, I longed for more about mothers and daughters. I guess it’s time to re-read Lift! Take a look at Kelly’s most recent YouTube clips about Glitter and Gluehere and here. This is also a favorite. You can find my reviews for The Middle Place and Lift here and here.
Lift by Kelly Corrigan Nonfiction - Memoir 2010 Voice (Hyperion) Finished on 3/8/10 and... 3/19/10 Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)
Publisher's Blurb:
No matter when and why this comes to your hands, I want to put down on paper how things started with us.
Written as a letter to her children, Kelly Corrigan's Lift is a tender, intimate, and robust portrait of risk and love; a touchstone for anyone who wants to live more fully. In Lift, Corrigan weaves together three true and unforgettable stories of adults willing to experience emotional hazards in exchange for the gratification of raising children.
Lift takes its name from hang gliding, a pursuit that requires flying directly into rough air, because turbulence saves a glider from "sinking out." For Corrigan, this wisdom—that to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages—becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors, particularly the great flight that is parenting.
Corrigan serves it up straight—how mundanely and fiercely her children have been loved, how close most lives occasionally come to disaster, and how often we fall short as mothers and fathers. Lift is for everyone who has been caught off guard by the pace and vulnerability of raising children, to remind us that our work is important and our time limited.
Like Ann Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, Lift is a meditation on the complexities of a woman's life, and like Corrigan's memoir, The Middle Place, Lift is boisterous and generous, a book readers can wait to share.
After finishing Lift, I did something I've never done before. I turned around and read it again. Not on the same day, but within a couple of weeks. The first reading took place over the course of two days. I wanted to savor this slim little book, taking in the freshness of Kelly's new work, wishing with each turned page that it was longer. The second reading took place yesterday afternoon. Snuggled under a blanket on the couch, snow gently falling outside, Post-it Note flags in hand, I began to read. And in my head I could hear Kelly's voice, sharing her stories with her young daughters, feeling a tug in my chest and a lump in my throat as I read the words that I knew would cause her to choke back her own tears.
It's tempting to share all of my favorite passages from Lift, but I have a feeling Kelly would frown upon me quoting her entire book! So here are just a few samples:
I heard once that the average person barely knows ten stories from childhood and those are based more on photographs and retellings than memory. So even with all the videos we take, the two boxes of snapshots under my desk, and the 1,276 photos in folders on the computer, you'll be lucky to end up with a dozen stories. You won't remember how it started with us, the things that I know about you that you don't even know about yourselves. We won't come back here.
You'll remember middle school and high school, but you'll have changed by then. You changing will make me change. That means you won't ever know me as I am right now—the mother I am tonight and tomorrow, the mother I've been for the last eight years, every bath and book and birthday party, gone. It won't hit you that you're missing this chapter of our story until you see me push your child on a swing or untangle his jump rope or wave a bee away from his head and think, Is this what she was like with me?
and
Georgia, you hate it when I cry. All my conspicuous emoting turns you off. That fed-up look you give me at teacher retirement parties or soccer games or the winter concert is partly how I know that I am only a few years away from exasperating you by the way I apply my lipstick or talk to waiters or answer the phone or drive or walk or breathe.
and
People rarely rave about their childhoods and it's no wonder. So many mistakes are made.
I see how that happens now, how we all create future work for our kids by checking our cell phones while you are mid-story or sticking you in the basement to watch a movie because we love you but we don't really want to be with you anymore that day, or coming unhinged over all manner of spilt milk—wet towels, unflushed toilets, lost brand-new! whatevers.
and
This tug-of-war often obscures what's also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can't imagine how seriously I take that—even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.
and
I remember having an awful conversation once, long before I became a mother, about whether it would be worse to lose a baby or a ten-year-old or a twenty-year-old, and so on. Why people think about these things, I don't know, but we do. We hover around the edges of catastrophe—trading headlines, reading memoirs about addiction and disease and abuse, watching seventeen seasons of ER. I said it would hurt the most to lose a twenty-year-old, because you'd have loved them so much longer and your attachment would be so much more specific. Babies love everyone and everyone loves them. But twenty-year-olds? They won't lean into just anyone. You have to earn any sliver of intimacy you share with them. Some pale memory of trust and connection has to hold against the callous disregard that is adolescence. And at twenty, they are just on their way back to you.
I love this book. It spoke to me on so many levels and I found myself nodding my head in agreement or recognition at least a dozen times. After I finished the first reading, I went to work and couldn't stop talking about what I'd just read. I found beautiful passages and read them aloud to coworkers. I promptly put four copies in the top tray on my endcap, eager to share my enthusiasm with my favorite customers. I made a mental note of friends and relatives I thought might also enjoy the book. And what timing! Tucked in a small basket with a bottle of perfume or lotion, and a little box of Godiva chocolate, Lift, with its warm and honest testimony of a mother's love, would make a perfect Mother's Day gift.
I rarely ever read the jacket blurbs or author endorsements until after I've read a book, so I was quite surprised to see the comparison to Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. About halfway into Lift, I had that exact same thought and even went so far as to go upstairs to find my copy of Gift of the Sea, with plans to read it again.
Bravo, Kelly! What a treasure you've given not only to your readers, but most importantly to your daughters.
I posted this clip a year or so ago, but want to include it again.
My review for Kelly's previous memoir, The Middle Place, can be found here.
Final thoughts: I listened to Gift of the Sea while walking on the bike trail near our house a few years ago. While I would love to experience the audio version of Lift, I think I better listen within the privacy of my home. It's one thing to suddenly burst out laughing while listening to an audio book in public and quite another to walk past strangers with tears streaming down one's cheeks.
I read this over on Kelly's blog and asked if she would mind if I posted it here. This is such a lovely "essay" about the power of friendship and I want to share it with all my girlfriends, today, on my 47th birthday. I want all of you to know how much your friendships mean to me. And if you haven't read Kelly's memoir, it will be out in paperback on the 23rd. You can read my review for the hardcover here.
Thank you, Kelly. This is such a special essay. You have quite a way with words!
Update: Go here to watch Kelly's touching trailer for the book.
The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan Memoir Finished 12/3/07 Rating: 4/5 (Very good) ARC - Book due out on January 8, 2008
Publisher's Blurb:
In humorous, incandescent prose, Kelly Corrigan alternates tales of growing up Corrigan with the story of her life and her father's today as they each--successfully, for now--battle cancer. A book that reminds us of the good things in life, The Middle Place examines the universal themes of family, adulthood, and how we all must, inevitably, make the leap to the other side and grow up.
Book Description:
For Kelly Corrigan, family is everything. At thirty-six, she had a marriage that worked, a couple of funny, active kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But even as a thriving adult, Kelly still saw herself as George Corrigan's daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. He greeted every day by opening his bedroom window and shouting, "Hello, World!" Suffice it to say, Kelly's was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to. Kelly lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place -- "that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap" -- comfortably wedged between her adult duties and her parents' care. But she's abruptly shoved into a coming-of-age when she finds a lump in her breast -- and gets the diagnosis no one wants to hear. And so Kelly's journey to full-blown adulthood begins. When George, too, learns he has late-stage cancer, it is Kelly's turn to take care of the man who had always taken care of her -- and show us a woman as she finally takes the leap and grows up. Kelly Corrigan is a natural-born storyteller, a gift you quickly recognize as her father's legacy, and her stories are rich with everyday details. She captures the beat of an ordinary life and the tender, sometimes fractious moments that bind families together. Rueful and honest, Kelly is the prized friend who will tell you her darkest, lowest, screwiest thoughts, and then later, dance on the coffee table at your party. Funny, yet heart-wrenching, The Middle Place is about being a parent and a child at the same time. It is about the special double-vision you get when you are standing with one foot in each place. It is about the family you make and the family you came from -- and locating, navigating, and finally celebrating the place where they meet. It is about reaching for life with both hands -- and finding it.
Two years ago, at the age of 41, my younger brother was diagnosed with rectal cancer. We had just experienced the absolute worst loss of our lives, only to learn of Chris' cancer 6 weeks after Rachel's death. We were stunned beyond belief. After two rounds of chemo, radiation, and radical surgery, Chris is now, thankfully, cancer-free. Somewhere along the line, in my quest to become more knowledgeable about this particular cancer (to learn how to help my brother emotionally, as well as educate myself about my increased risk as a sibling), I stumbled upon a particularly informative website. While CircusOfCancer is a site for those seeking information about breast cancer rather than colo-rectal cancer, it provided me with an insider's view to chemo, radiation, how to talk to friends with cancer, etc. I was moved by the story behind the website and read everything posted, including the photo essays. Little did I know, two years down the road I'd pick up an Advanced Reader's Copy of Kelly Corrigan's memoir, only to discover that she was the creator of CircusOfCancer! What a small world.
Corrigan is a marvelous storyteller, drawing you into her family and home with the ease of a seasoned writer. When I finished the book, I felt as if I'd met her in person, trading stories about family and love and fear and loss. In typical fashion, I read with a packet of sticky notes in hand and wound up with a dozen or so pages marked for a second reading. This first passage is from the Prologue:
...I called my parents from the maternity ward and cried through the following: "Mom, Dad, it's a girl, and Dad, we named her after you. We named her Georgia."
Three years after that, almost to the day, I called home to tell my parents that I had cancer.And that's what this whole thing is about. Calling home. Instinctively. Even when all the paperwork--a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns--clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter.
I especially like this brief passage:
I get another e-mail from a particularly grown-up friend of mine, Jen Komosa. She just says, "You are stronger than you think. You are strong enough."
Such truth in these simple words. I never thought I could survive the loss of one of our children and I'm sure there were times when my brother thought he couldn't survive the rigors of cancer treatment. But it's amazing what the heart and mind and body can endure. We are all stronger than we think.
I like the cadence of these particular paragraphs:
There is fear, like the moment before a car accident or the jolt that shoots through you when you see your baby slip under water, and there is pain, like whacking your head into a cabinet door left open or the quiver in your shoulders as you carry your end of the sofa up those last few stairs, fingers slipping. And then there is pain and fear together, like delivery a baby or standing up for the first time after surgery. Until they tell you it's working, chemo is like that, pain and fear, fear and pain, alternating relentlessly. Yesterday, I took eighteen pills in twenty-four hours for everything from the well-known side effects like nausea and fatigue to the secret ones like runaway infections and tear-jerking constipation. Each side effect can be treated with medication, which usually has its own side effect. For nausea: Zofran. For the constipation caused by Zofran: laxatives and stool softeners. To ward of infection and stabilize your white blood cell counts: Neupogen. For the deep bone pain caused by Neupogen: Vicodin, which in turn causes nausea and drowsiness. And there you are, right back where you started.
I nodded my head in agreement when I read this:
I envy my dad his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.
I remember feeling this way after Rachel died. And I remember feeling like this, too:
I feel different from everyone these days. Words are loaded now--people who were "so sick they wanted to die," who ate "so much they wanted to puke," who hope someone will "take them out back and shoot them" before they get old and infirm.
And yet, as I relate to quite a bit of Kelly's thoughts and feelings, I became annoyed when I read the following passage (her response to learning she would need to begin hormone therapy in order to temporarily eliminate estrogen from her system, thus postponing the possibility of any more children for five more years):
I shake my head. "They talked about cancer like it was something to get through, to treat, to beat." They never said it was going to change everything, all my plans, and take things away from me that I have wanted since I was a child. "They said it was gonna be a bad year. So doesn't that mean when the bad year is over, when you do everything you are told to do--and with a goddamn smile no less--you get to go back to the life you had?" Finally, I just stare ahead. I'm so mad and so tired at the same time. "I thought that was what I was here for--to raise a bunch of kids," I say as we get closer to home.
I wanted to reach through the pages and past and shake this young woman and tell her she should be thankful to be alive. Thankful to have two beautiful daughters, a loving husband, devoted parents and friends and relatives who love her deeply. I wanted to tell her that while my brother is also a cancer survivor, he didn't get to go back to the life he once had either, but he's deeply grateful for his life, physically altered though it may be.
I can't begin to imagine how I'd personally handle the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, but I did watch my brother ride the emotional rollercoaster for the longest year of his life. I'd like to think that Kelly's reaction to the hormone therapy was exacerbated by the stress and emotional fragility of that long year in her life and that she can now appreciate how truly blessed she is to have what she has.
And now to jump on my soap box -- Many, many cancers are treatable, if detected early. If you are 50 or older, get a colonoscopy! I had one two years ago (six years sooner than normal, but highly recommended due to the hereditary risk as a sibling), and quite honestly, it's not a big deal. I was alseep through the entire procedure and the prep the day before was certainly tolerable. I'd gladly have that test once every five years if it prevents the ill effects of chemo (nausea, chemo brain, neuropathy, mouth sores, etc.), not to mention prolonging my life.
by 
. About halfway into 
