Do your work, I tell myself. And after? Find a patch of lawn and sit down and hug your knees to your chest and let everything you’ve ever been told and everything you’ve ever seen mingle together in a show just for you, your own eye-popping pageant of existence, your own twelve-thousand-line epic poem. The tickle of the grass on your thighs, the sky moving over you, sunless or blue, echoes from a homily or a wedding toast or a letter your grandmother sent. Remember something good, a sunburn you liked the feeling of, a plate of homemade pasta. Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce.
~ Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say (January 9, 2018)
Photo: poppins-me
Ok.,putting this book in the queue
Her voice, is your voice. Don’t want to oversell, but I can read her words, and see your lips moving. Hope you like it.
“This isn’t just a kid making a hero out of her dad. And me? I walked next to him in that festival light for almost fifty years and then, one night in February, his hand went still in mine and here I am, same as ever, except quicker to anger and thirteen pounds heavier. Shouldn’t loss change a person, for the better, forever? Maybe Will’s curious phrase – It’s like this – applies here, too. This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.”
~ Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say (Random House Publishing Group, January 9, 2018)
I’m breathless, truly breathless as I nod ‘yes, yes, yes’, and in this brief paragraph, I identify and silent tears fall. Wow. Wow. Wow.
I could share many but enough spoilers…
Yum!
He voice is so fresh. Funny, candid, poignant. And you’re right, DK, Mimi writes the same way! We are blessed to have our own Kelly right in our midst!
Smiling. I am right! (This time)
“rest from the striving to reduce.” perfect.
Yes…right there.
Love how her spirit shines through in her writing 💛
It really does Val. It’s as if your best friend sits in confessional with you.
Like Mimi, another book to add to my ever-growing list. Would that I could write in such a manner…
Me too Dale, me too.
And yet… you do…