Reading from the Middle Place:
Learning to Live Without Hair
Reading from the Middle Place:
The Guess Jeans Fight of 1984
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Kelly Corrigan’s family is long on characters, her father George chief among them. The center of an ebullient, raucous and largely untested tribe, George greets every day by opening his bedroom window and calling out, “Hello World!” Suffice to say, it was the kind of childhood a girl could get attached to. But, in the fall of 2004, crisis hit and Kelly discovered that although she had all the makings of an adult life—a marriage license, two birth certificates, a mortgage, and tax returns—she was still more daughter than mother.
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.
Corrigan is a natural-born storyteller: fighting with her mother over an indispensable pair of Guess jeans, accidentally murdering her brother’s new boa constrictor, fastidiously French braiding her hair on prom night. Mixing childhood stories with those of her adult life, Corrigan takes us through an anxious winter of panic attacks, the long and wicked morning that anesthesia failed to soothe the birth of ten-pounder, and the vexing, disconcerting need to understand why her husband calls his mother so often. She captures the beat of an ordinary life and the tender, sometimes fractious moments that bind families together. Kelly Corrigan is funny, rueful, and honest—the prized friend who will tell you her darkest, lowest, screwiest thoughts and then later that night, dance on the coffee table at your party.
Kelly Corrigan has a great sense of humor, an honest voice, and a brilliant way of telling it like it is—but that's just for starters. It's her heart that really counts. The Middle Place is a love letter to family and home and life.
Kelly Corrigan's utterly absorbing memoir, The Middle Place, is wry, smart, and often heart wrenching. Corrigan takes us down memory lane and then, at the same time, down some other, darker road most of us hope never to travel. Yet we follow her all the way, quite willingly, I might add, thanks to her sharp eye for the details and her great sense of humor.
Kelly Corrigan takes what might have been a fairly standard story of survival, and reframed it, most charmingly, as a coming of age narrative. We see here a headstrong girl, under the most severe adversity, turn into a genuinely strong woman.