You Remind Me Of You: A Poetry Memoir [Paperback]

Eireann Corrigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2002

A startling, remarkable poetry memoir of love and pain, hurt and recovery.

For three years, Eireann Corrigan was in and out of treatment facilities for her eating disorders. By the time she graduated high school, her doctors said she was going to die if things didn't change. That July, her high school boyfriend attempted suicide. In one gunshot moment, everything was altered.
In a striking and vivid voice, Eireann Corrigan recounts these events, finding meaning in the hurt, humor in the horror, and grace in the struggle that life demands. You Remind Me of You is a testament to the binding ties of love and pain, and the strange paths we take to recovery.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Struggling for years with eating disorders, in and out of treatment facilities, Eireann Corrigan is teetering on the brink of no return when her high school boyfriend attempts suicide. Suddenly, Eireann is on the other side of the high-railed hospital bed, and on an entirely unexpected path to recovery herself. In this witty, smart, and heart-rending poetry memoir, author Eireann Corrigan takes a breathtakingly honest look at herself as she wends her way through profoundly difficult times. Her complicated relationship with her sweetheart is captured in the second-person prosaic verses scattered throughout, as well as in the interviews, presumably with a therapist, that fill in many of the blanks left by the sometimes cryptic first-person narrative. We are invited inside Eireann's head to try with her to understand the bewildering chain of events and emotions that led to such chapter heads as "She Tries Out for Varsity Recklessness and Only Makes JV," and "She Never Claimed Reliable Narrator Status," and "Eventually, They Had a Sex Life." (Ages 14 and older) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly

Corrigan, now in her 20s, recounts her experiences as a teenager with an eating disorder in a series of poems distinguished more by the shock value of their contents than by their insight or literary merit. Along with the graphic details of the adolescent Corrigan's secret stockpiles of sealed plastic bags containing her regurgitated meals and her ruses in feigning weight gain, topics include her high school boyfriend Daniel, who shoots himself between the eyes only to have the bullet ricochet out of an eye socket, leaving him alive and, eventually, able to function. Corrigan, still severely anorexic, is with another boyfriend, Ben, when the suicide attempt takes place, but she rushes to Daniel's bedside, aids in his slow recovery and realizes she wants to recover, too. (At some point Ben fatally drives his car into a tree.) Frequent attempts at irony don't deflect from the writer's absorption in her symptoms. Various incidents are rehashed repeatedly, even aggrandized (e.g., comparisons of herself and Daniel to Orpheus and Eurydice), but more fundamental narrative questions receive little attention: why, after all, do these individuals suffer in these particular ways? Corrigan acknowledges that her illness includes elements of competitiveness (as an inpatient, she and her fellows envy the clavicle of a particularly skeletal girl) and exhibitionism ("I wore sleeveless dresses even with scars on my wrists"); both these elements seem fully exploited here. Ages 13-up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Push (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0439297710
• ISBN-13: 978-0439297714
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #748,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, Smart, Real...GREAT., March 12, 2002

By 

"diane66" (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Remind Me Of You: A Poetry Memoir (Paperback)

This is my very favorite book!
Eireann's story is the most elegant retelling of what it's like to be sick, to be sad in your teens and what love can [and cannot] do to save you.

It is both a heartrending account of a terribly sad illness, the way in which that illness turns you into your own worst enemy, and the possibilty for healing and for love.

I read the whole book in one afternoon cause I couldn't put it down. It's so real. Not only is it an elegant account of her sickness but also jut about the best depiction of teenage love I have read. Eireann really understands the way in which teens believe and act in accordance with an idea of a higher, truer, better love. It is also about coming to understand just how much love can help you--and what love can't do. Ultimately Eireann got better because she understood the dead-end nihilism of her situation and chose to make herself better.

I expected to be moved. I didn't expect to laugh so much and to laugh and cry on the same page. Her ability to move the reader from the bitter to the sweet and back again, often within the same passage, is the mark of a poet fully in control of her craft and honest and playful with her life.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT RIGHT., March 12, 2002

By 

Richard Rambone (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Remind Me Of You: A Poetry Memoir (Paperback)

I picked up a copy of You Remind Me Of You with a rather morbid interest. My sister had been an anorexic and the literature I'd absorbed to understand her plight ranged from the uselessly juvenile to the deeply self-abusive. Everyone who tackled the issue seemed interested primarily in disguising masochistic boasts under the goopy rhetoric of the self-help movement. Fine for therapy but of little interest to someone trying to understand the mechanics of the illness.

The glut of private, soupy memoirs made me suspicious of Ms. Corrigan's book--a memoir told by a 24 year-old that dealt with anorexia and ended with her boyfriend's would-be Cobain finish--"Dear God!" I thought, "must all our wounds go undressed? Does everybody's private anguish deserve a book deal?"

Well in Ms. Corrigan's case absolutely. One of her poems is worth fifty of Elizabeth Wurtzel's self-pitying memoirs. Ms. Corrigan's story could all too easily dip into the realm of the pseudo-Plath but her wit, playfulness and, ultimately, willingness to be honest about her own complicity in her situation redeems the narrative. Ms. Corrigan writes with a certainty and verve remarkably assured for someone who can't be more than a few years out of college and is able to make the rather grim details of her situation--the gory truth of anorexia is an ugly scene--more than simply shocking. Critics who have picked on her careful attention to the gruesome details of her illness as some form of masturbatory shock factor totally miss the point. To avoid a frank discussion of her situation would be to let herself off the hook and gussey up the nasty way in which eating disorders make sufferers both victim and victimizer.

This is a courageous book. It is a moving book. It is also a funny book. But mostly this is a poet at the top of her game. I hungerly await her next work.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Reminds Me of Great Reading, January 30, 2002

By 

"brianselander" (Wilmington, DE United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Remind Me Of You: A Poetry Memoir (Paperback)

At its heart a moving drama of love, death and rebirth (sort of Plath meets Lazarus), Corrigan's book is also an unintended antidote for the millions of girls poisoned by the desire for the unattainable abs of the modern pop princess (Starve me, baby, one more time?). For this work, Corrigan chose a writing style that allows her to capture the subtle nuances of pain, hope and helplessness, while remaining accessible to the anguished pre-teens for whom the story serves as warning.

More than just offering the reader good literature, the author performs a great service by giving us a window into her pain. It is a poetic confession that leaves us, the readers, aware of our own need for penance.

In some of its early scenes, the story becomes the most modern of fairy tales. While dragons once locked damsels in towers, today we find anorexia chaining distressed heroines in hospital wards. While true love used to ride to the rescue, the prince now gets stoned in his car. Corrigan later becomes the prince herself, waking her beloved from a very different kind of enchanted sleep. As the narrator grows back into an adult from her anorexia-imposed state of physical infancy, the tone matures as well.

In a culture awash in "reality programming," Corrigan's book proves as poignant, poetic, and real as anything I have watched or heard in years.