Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light: Essays (Random House Large Print)

Product Description
The bestselling author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code returns with a viciously funny, deeply felt collection of essays on friendship among grown-ass women.\nWhen Helen Ellis and her lifelong friends arrive for a reunion on the Redneck Riviera, they unpack more than their suitcases: stories of husbands and kids; lost parents and lost jobs; powdered onion dip and photographs you have to hold by the edges; dirty jokes and sunscreen with SPF higher than they hair-sprayed their bangs senior year; and a bad mammogram. It's a diagnosis that scares them, but could never break their bond. Because women pushing fifty won't be pushed around.\nIn these twelve gloriously comic and moving essays, Helen Ellis dishes on married middle-age sex, sobs with a theater full of women as a psychic exorcises their sorrows, gets twenty shots of stomach bile to the neck to get rid of her double chin, and gathers up the courage to ask, "Are you there, Menopause? It's Me, Helen."\nA book that reads like the best cocktail party of your life,
Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light is chockablock with fabulous characters: cat-lady plastic surgeons and waterpark Adonises; bridge ladies and poker players; platinum medallion fliers and Garage Sale Swindlers; forty-year-old divorcées; fifty-year-old new moms and still-young octogenarians. Alive with the sensational humor and ferocious love for her friends that won Helen Ellis legions of fans, this book has a raw vulnerability and an emotional generosity that takes this acclaimed author to a whole new level of accomplishment.
Review
SOUTHERN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A New York Post Best New Book to Read • A Garden and Gun Best Book of the Year • A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book • A PureWow Best Beach Read •
A Buzzfeed Book to Read this Summer • A People Best Book of the Week\n“Sharply funny… Ellis has clearly found her stride — or, in her case, her strut. The writer who so memorably opened
American Housewife with a Beyoncé-inspired 'stallion walk to the toaster' is indeed noticeably unbridled and self-assured in this collection… The spirit of Nora Ephron… hovers over this book… Ellis' prose is filled with so many laugh lines, you might want to go ahead and book the Botox… Ellis is a hoot. She's also a force… She has come to own the power of her personality — and her work.”
—Heller McAlpin,
NPR"Despite how often I type the letters 'LOL,' it actually takes a lot for me to laugh out loud. But I found myself doing so at least once a chapter while reading the Alabama native Helen Ellis’s new essay collection,
Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light... Hilarious."
—Amanda Heckert,
Garden and Gun\n"As with everything written by the Alabama-born novelist who gave us
Southern Lady Code, this collection of twelve essays is equal parts irreverent and poignant—a mirthful toast to friendship at middle age."
—
Southern Living
"Helen Ellis has done it again. And by it, we mean she's pulled together her thoughts on life's disparate moments and produced an inspiring, hilarious, straight-to-the-point essay collection."\n—Entertainment Weekly"Ellis is a humorist, a writer with a sharp eye for finding the funny in any situation... Secrets are exactly what make Ellis’s essay collection fun. She doesn’t hold back... A little bit naughty, but also self-aware... She writes without fear of exposing her own vulnerabilities, of putting on display for everyone to see what many people would want to hide, and in that willingness, what emerges feels real and genuine."\n—Southern Review of Books\n"You gotta love a middle-aged gal who enjoys the 'good ole-boy adonises' at a water park in Georgia, plays professional poker in her pearls and speculates with her chagrined husband about her friends’ sex lives ('Those two have costumes'). Ellis is as original as she is hilarious, and in these laugh-out-loud essays she unleashes her no-holds-barred humor while sneaking in sharp and generous in