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THE MIDDLE PLACE by Kelly Corrigan

THE MIDDLE PLACE

by Kelly Corrigan

Pub Date: Jan. 8th, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0336-5
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion

A cancer survivor’s memoir with a welcome twist: a laughter-filled celebration of family.

Newspaper columnist Corrigan was 36 when she discovered a lump in her left breast. Happily married and the mother of two young daughters, she was also still very much the adoring daughter of demonstrative, exuberant George Corrigan. Being upbeat and funny was de rigueur with her optimistic father, so the author’s reaction to her breast-cancer diagnosis was to send an e-mail to about 100 people inviting them to a party one year hence to celebrate her recovery. But when George was diagnosed with bladder cancer and seemed too casual about his treatment, she became exasperated. Living in the Bay Area, she hounded his East Coast doctors by e-mail and took over the central role of information gatherer and advice dispenser. Only her own upcoming surgery kept her from heading to Philadelphia to take charge. At the same time that she was coping with her own cancer and trying to micromanage her father’s, she was busy mothering two little girls too young to understand what was happening. Tender scenes with her daughters and some frustrating ones with her strong-willed mother give context to Corrigan’s account of two battles against cancer. She also tosses into the mix funny, often self-deprecating tales of growing up in a boisterous Irish Catholic family, her adventures abroad in her 20s and her marriage to the comparatively subdued Edward. The author is, in her words, living in “the middle place—that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap.” Attachments to both the family she grew up in and the family she created remain strong, but as her husband reminds her, their daughters, not her parents, are the future.

Warm, funny and a touch bittersweet.