The Middle Place
by Kelly Corrigan
First reviewed by Sandra M. Dempsey, January 18, 2009
After seeing Kelly Corrigan read a personal essay she had written on Borders.com, I went straight to the store at lunch the same day and bought the only copy they had in stock. I never even read the dust jacket until I got home.
It was then that I realized this book was about the ‘big C’. I never buy books about stories of woman and cancer. I bought one book when my Mom had breast cancer, but could never bring myself to read it.
I put “The Middle Place” on my bookshelf at the bottom of my ‘to read’ pile.
But, it wouldn’t leave me alone. It seemed to haunt me from the shelf. I finally gave in.
I read this book in one sitting. Once I started I could not put it down. I started at dinner and read the last page at 1035pm, which, if you know me, is pretty late.
Kelly Corrigan’s writing is absolutely captivating in its honesty as she writes about both the mundane and surreal moments in life.
Kelly Corrigan, thirty-six-years-old and just mere weeks from her thirty-seventh birthday comes face to face with every woman’s fear while bathing her two girls when she accidentally discovers a lump in her breast.
“The Middle Place” is not just a story about one woman’s breast cancer. That story is there, but there is so much more. She expertly weaves stories from the past with the present, taking you through routine days of being a sixth grader caught up in prepubescent politics to getting her first chemo treatment. Her stories are roller coaster rides of fear, anger, joy and love, just like real life. She is a real person living a real life.
She is a mother, a wife, a sibling and a friend. She is, at the same time, a father’s daughter and a mother’s daughter, and there is a difference. “The Middle Place” is a honest, emotional story about straddling ‘the middle place’ of being both a daughter and a wife/mother, of growing up and wondering if we ever grow up.
Comment below or email me: Sandy@thedreamingcafe.com
