Customer Reviews

Lift

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was on the bus, on the way to collect our daughter at her best friend's apartment, so of course I was reading. The book was "Lift", Kelly Corrigan's 84-page snip of a book. My ambition was to finish it in less than 20 minutes --- the time it takes a slow bus, in late afternoon traffic, to get across town.

Yes, I read fast and I am often in a hurry to boot, but I was working toward a personal best here for another reason: I had figured the book out. The arc of it was simple. Corrigan's love letter to her two young daughters becomes a meditation on Rilke's line, "The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance."

That's an interesting idea. Especially to parents --- we've all had it. The ticking clock. How the days are long, but the years are short. How our kids can't know what they mean to us until they have kids who mean everything to them.

That commonality --- feelings that apply to soccer moms and cynical moms alike --- is the reason that "Lift" will be a Mother's Day gift of choice deep into the next millennium. For Kelly Corrigan is the poet laureate of the ordinary. There's no cliche she doesn't kiss on the mouth. If she has a thought that isn't universal, she suppresses it. No wonder she is staggeringly popular with middle-aged women --- she is her readers.

Proof: Her video about women who transcend the dailiness of life, the cruelties of age and the shock of death has been viewed 4,655,000 times since December, 2008.

Proof: "The Middle Place" - her first book, which is about her marriage and her cancer and her dad's cancer, her kids and her childhood --- is a staple of reading groups.

Proof: Her video for "Lift" shows her --- a pleasant person with sensible glasses, a pony tail and a baseball cap she wears in the house --- playing piano ("Heart and Soul") with her kids, then reading to them from her book. In my version of this video, our kid would flee the camera; these kids soldier on. Which is charming --- or is it exploitative?

My resistance started to crumble when Corrigan began to write about her Stage 3 breast cancer, which kills 4 of every 10 women who get it. (She seems to have beaten it, but...) And then there's the infant with meningitis ("It's one thing to know your child is in pain, it's another to attend it"), and a teenaged boy killed in a car crash, and an aunt who is a great woman and wants kids but has no man, and then the pictures at the end, and .. . And yeah, there's lots about kids having trouble reading "Harry Potter" and feeling bad about small slights and the skinned knees of daily life, but this big stuff --- it accumulates, and then it knocks you down.

Yes, I lost it. Because Kelly Corrigan is very good at what she does. It may be sincerity. It is certainly manipulation. Underneath it all may be a mind so calculating --- a writer's mind --- that she knows exactly where and how to place her detonators. Lord knows there are many. "I am your mother, the first mile of your road," she writes. And, about her kids, "This was my dream. You were my dream."

Sitting on that bus, I fought back the sobs, but the tears streamed down, for I knew exactly what she meant --- my wife and I had married late and started the fertility challenge even later and it's pretty much a miracle that we have our kid.

So those words that Kelly Corrigan writes? They're mine.

And if you are a parent, yours too, I'd bet.

If ever a book ought to come attached to a box of Kleenex, this is it.

I'm a guy. Reading this book helped me to understand how women think, how women feel, what women want, and a lot of things I never knew before. It helped me to understand my mother, my wife, my sister, and all the other women and mothers who have always seemed so mysterious to me.

The author does a fabulous job of conjuring those telling moments in her family life. Her economical use of words in distilling those moments and emotions was simply magical.

Guys, read it when she is finished. You'll be glad that you did.

I picked up my copy of Lift and sat down on the floor of my bedroom and just read it - I didn't move for an hour. Just as I did with the Middle Place, I laughed and wept. Mostly I felt relieved that like Kelly I don't know what souvenirs to keep and don't know whether I am doing damage when I "verbally discipline" my adorable children but tonight I found myself giggling in my kitchen as I cleaned up the dinner dishes and listened to my 6 and 8 yr olds try to figure out all the words to a Ben Folds song.

Thank you Kelly for telling your stories. They not only entertain, they resonate.

A tiny book (82 pages) that I read in about an hour. If you are Kelly's daughter, husband, or friend you will love the book. For those of us unrelated to Kelly, the book is a disappointment. I loved the Middle Place, and hoped for more substance in this book. Overpriced at $16.99.

Like The Middle Place MIDDLE PLACE, LIFT has the ability to cause you to take pause from your busy life and think about what's important to you, what you really care about, and what you should be thankful for. How many books do that? A quick but fulfilling read, a special book.

While this book may perhaps on its face seem to be talking primarily to mothers (and is certainly being marketed as such), as a dad of two i can say that it resonated with me just as much as it did with my wife. Okay, well, maybe not the part about early menopause...but just about everything else. This book is the perfect gift for ANYONE who is a parent (or wants to be) and serves as an inspiration for all of us to write a letter, or a series of letters over time, to our kids. Kelly is as sentimental as someone can possibly be without ever becoming implausibly and nauseatingly mushy and uses humor and everyday details to keep the book incredibly grounded and real. This book is about the epiphanies that occur within the context of our everyday lives with kids and shares an appreciation for the magic and fragility that are there every day even when we don't notice them. It also is a reminder that we really are just renting our kids for a very short window of our lives.

I started this one and, when I teared up within the first four pages, I knew I would have to sit and finish the whole thing. The book is essentially a short little gift that Corrigan has written for her daughters to read years from now to understand their mother's love and I don't know how any mother couldn't relate. She covers the big and little of life that we all go through as parents and how we have to summon up the courage to be there for our kids. I teared up several more times during the book and I'm so glad that this is one that I purchased because I know it is one I will pick up again and again as I raise my own kids. I also enjoyed Corrigan's The Middle Place, so I will be anxiously awaiting anything by her in the future.

Loved this book! Kelly is very frank and a great writer. I wish she lived closer, I'd want to be her friend! She has been through a lot and expresses it amazingly well. She had me laughing and crying out loud. I can't wait to read The Middle Place.

Kelly Corrigan wrote with wit and a never-waning sense of wonder about her parents in the 2008 bestseller THE MIDDLE PLACE. She does the same for her children in LIFT, which is short and sweet, occasionally sentimental, stylishly sagacious, and, at times, sardonic. It is a cross between a mother's diary and a sea captain's log, mixing the salty behind-the-scenes true grit of parenthood with a parent's most secret longings for her children.

Kelly has two daughters, who were barely toddling when she discovered that she had breast cancer, the subject of her earlier book. Now they are growing up, maybe too quickly for her taste. "You won't remember how it started with us, the things that I know about you that you don't even know about yourselves...you'll remember middle school and high school, but you'll have changed by then." One suspects --- no, one is sure --- that LIFT is Kelly's way of trying to guarantee that no matter what happens, her girls will have a written set of memories to cherish when the incidents of childhood are long forgotten.

One reason why Kelly may have more than the ordinary mother's zeal to keep those precious moments alive is found in the story of her friend Kathy and Kathy's son Aaron. Aaron was "a joker and an optimist and a ponderer of great and small things." One night he went out to "swing by and say hello to some people" and never came home. "I tell you about Aaron," she writes to her little girls, "because I want you to live longer than he did."

With cutting-edge humor that any parent can identify with, Corrigan tells us that "my default answer to everything is no." But, she confesses to her daughters, "What you probably wouldn't believe is how much I want to say yes." Motherhood is all about that tug of war and the mind's responsibility to say no when your heart wants to say yes.

One of the fine moments of motherhood is captured in a long sequence reliving the time Kelly and her husband thought baby Claire might have spinal meningitis. The harrowing wait for test results, the frustration and helplessness of watching a baby suffer through terrifying medical procedures remind us that all parents have to be brave, make hard choices, and cry inwardly while waiting and hoping without breaking down outwardly. It goes with the territory.

The title of the book comes from the image of hang gliding --- Kelly's friend tells her that the sport involves flying "from thermal to thermal, looking for lift." And though turbulence is dangerous, it's also "the only way to get altitude." Kelly knows, and shows us, that family life also involves looking for lift among periods of turbulence --- because when you find it, you fly.

After finishing Lift, I did something I've never done before. I turned around and read it again. Not on the same day, but within a couple of weeks. The first reading took place over the course of two days. I wanted to savor this slim little book, taking in the freshness of Kelly's new work, wishing with each turned page that it was longer. The second reading took place yesterday afternoon. Snuggled under a blanket on the couch, snow gently falling outside, Post-it Note flags in hand, I began to read. And in my head I could hear Kelly's voice, sharing her stories with her young daughters, feeling a tug in my chest and a lump in my throat as I read the words that I knew would cause her to choke back her own tears.

I love this book. It spoke to me on so many levels and I found myself nodding my head in agreement or recognition at least a dozen times. After I finished the first reading, I went to work and couldn't stop talking about what I'd just read. I found beautiful passages and read them aloud to coworkers. I made a mental note of friends and relatives I thought might also enjoy the book. And what timing! Tucked in a small basket with a bottle of perfume or lotion, and a little box of Godiva chocolate, Lift, with its warm and honest testimony of a mother's love, would make a perfect Mother's Day gift.

I rarely ever read the jacket blurbs or author endorsements until after I've read a book, so I was quite surprised to see the comparison to Lindbergh's Gift of the Sea. About halfway into Lift, I had that exact same thought and even went so far as to go upstairs to find my copy of Gift of the Sea, with plans to read it again.

Bravo, Kelly! What a treasure you've given not only to your readers, but most importantly to your daughters.