The Middle Place—“that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap.” That moment when one is comfortably wedged between adult duties and still falling beneath a parents’ care. It is about being a parent and a child at the same time.
At thirty-six, Kelly Corrigan (both author and main character) had a marriage that worked, two funny, active kids, and a weekly newspaper column. She also has a lump in her breast and gets the diagnosis no one wants to hear.
For Kelly, family is everything. Her entire identity is carefully constructed around her relationship with her Irish-American, charmer-of-a-father, George Corrigan.
“The thing you need to know about me is that I am George Corrigan’s daughter, his only daughter.
He’s Catholic. That’s the first thing he’d want you to know about him. Goes to church many times a week. Calls it “God’s House” and talks about it in loyal, familiar terms, the way the Irish talk about their corner pub.
You also need to know about the lacrosse thing. He’s in the Hall of Fame, partly because he was an all-American in 1953 and 1954 but mostly because now, in his retirement, he marches up and down the field of my old high school, Radnor, side by side with a guy thirty years his junior, coaching the kids who want to be lacrosse stars. I’ve watched a hundred games sitting next to him; both my brothers played for years. Not being an athlete myself, I am amused by how attached he is to the game. He remembers every play and can talk about a single game for hours. The words don’t mean much to me, but the emotion needs no translation.
And he’s a Corrigan. He was one of six loud, funny kids who broke out of a tiny house on Clearspring Road in working-class Baltimore.”
The Middle Place is a memoir of one year in the life of a cancer patient who was the spoiled daughter who craved her father’s attention. During that year, her father also is diagnosed with bladder cancer. What I most related to was her all encompassing desire to try to leave the same kind of memories for her daughters that her father had given her.
Many times throughout the book the author seems to acknowledge that she operated through life believing things centered on her and reflected a bit on the reasons for her selfishness.
Corrigan is diagnosed with breast cancer, and the book focuses mainly on how she handles this crisis – while still protecting her children, and being there to support her aging parents.
I thought it was interesting how readers found it odd that on the day she found out about her diagnosis, she chose to email her 100 closest friends about what she was going through. While touching, it failed to acknowledge that many of the people she was sending the email too had probably already been through a similar experience. This anecdote highlighted Corrigan’s focus on the self and while she consistently wanted her friends to walk in her painful shoes, she rarely seemed able to walk in theirs, or ever acknowledge that others might be going through difficult times of their own.
While I found her struggle with cancer to be quite honest and read many scenes depicting her close relationship with her father with a lump in my throat, it was easy to be frustrated by her view of the world, which often seemed to presume that she was the only one suffering and failing to fully appreciate that she had a family willing to go above and beyond in every situation.
This is an amazing and though provoking story. The writing is heartfelt and Corrigan expressed thoughts in print that seem to be the secret feelings we harbor inside of ourselves.
A perfect choice for any book club with characters you will come to love and wish to meet.
GENRE: Memoir/Biography
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