Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light
$16.00
| Title | Range | Discount |
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| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
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Description
The bestselling author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code returns with an “inspiring, hilarious, straight-to-the-point” (Entertainment Weekly) collection of essays on friendship among grown-ass women.When 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.
In 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.”
A book that reads like the best cocktail party of your life, Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light is 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. 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“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“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.”
—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.”
—Southern Review of Books“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 insights.”
—People
“An uproarious joyride, best enjoyed with a souvenir cup of white wine. Her tales of travels and tribulations with her middle-aged crew are both deep and deeply funny, seeded with bumper-sticker lines like, ‘Instead of a chip on my shoulder, I keep a Nestlé morsel under my brastrap.’”
—Martha Stewart Living
“Ellis, whose uproarious essays call to mind the warm, brassy and amused tone of a latter-day Erma Bombeck, here celebrates middle-aged female friendship.”
—The New York Times
“Masterful wit…Helen Ellis shares twelve humorous yet poignant essays chronicling issues faced by her friends and herself as they wade into their fifties. During a reunion on ‘the Redneck Riviera,’ the women dish about middle-aged married sex, family, careers, double chins, mammograms, poker, and more. You’ll laugh — and, perhaps, cry — along with them in this slim collection.”
—Zibby Owens, Good Morning America“What do you get when you cross an Alabama debutante with an Upper East Side socialite and a world class poker player? You get Helen Ellis’ s new collection of essays, delivering home truths with an iron fist wrapped in a cashmere glove. Whether she’s writing about the outrageousness of ‘her kind of people’ or why she needs to take the Greyhound for her trips to Atlantic City, you’ll chuckle along on every page.”
—Emily Crowe, Buzzfeed
“Imagine your funniest friend—the one who can take make you laugh with little more than a sideways glance. The one who can make light of even the direst of situations. Now imagine that friend sitting you down and regaling you with twelve of her trademark wonderful stories… Conversational, witty and often poignant, the collection is one you’ll blow through while ear-marking pages to send to your group chat with your friends… Above all else, Ellis is an absolute joy to read.”
—Sarah Stiefvater, PureWow“This collection is sneaky good. At first reading, it feels like a trifle, a treat. But once you’ve finished, you realize how important its messages are: Friends are how we get through a punishing world; it is absolutely imperative to fully embrace who you are; never take yourself too seriously; all we can do is take the next best step for us.”
—The Bitter Southerner“Whether she’s playing poker or second fiddle, Ellis proves again she is in it to win it, with this essay collection… Unpretentious and uplifting, Ellis’s writing on friendship reads more like a conversation you’d have with your best friend than an essay by a stranger… Readers looking for a new literary pal who’s classy enough to wear pearls at the poker table, and brave enough to visit a crowded water park post-menopause, need look no further. Recommend to fans of Nora Ephron and Annabelle Gurwitch.”
—Library Journal, starred
“The author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code cuts loose with uproarious observations on friendship, middle age, and her own life… This smart, sassy, page-turning collection will appeal to fans of the author’s work as well as anyone who enjoys the quick-witted jocularity of a singular Southern woman who refuses to let anything—or anyone—get her down… Darkly hilarious.”
—Kirkus“With the ongoing pandemic, many are in need of a good laugh. Thankfully, Ellis’ essays deliver hilarity on every page, providing the perfect way to get one’s socially distanced jollies. A seasoned Manhattanite by way of Alabama, Ellis entertains with a spicy blend of good ol’-gal snark and seasoned urban savvy, disarming folks with her tongue-in-cheek Southern bellecharm and shocking the unsuspecting with her flinty, no-nonsense persona.”
—Booklist“Ellis… shines in this collection of essays that lovingly underscores the importance of having a circle of close friends… Charming and frank life lessons ensue… Ellis balances intimacy, humor, and directness… The result is a candid, funny reminder that one need not take life too seriously.”
—Publishers Weekly HELEN ELLIS is the author of Southern Lady Code, American Housewife and Eating the Cheshire Cat. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City. You can find her on Twitter @WhatIDoAllDay and Instagram @HelenEllisAuthor.
Grown-Ass Ladies Gone Mild
From the start of our grown-ass ladies’ trip to Panama City Beach, aka “The Redneck Riviera,” Paige and I could see that Vicki was having a hard time. Days before, she’d dropped her eldest off at college and gotten a bad mammogram. Her follow-up biopsy was scheduled for the week after our reunion with two other childhood friends, and until then, all Vicki wanted to do was stay in her room, sleep late, sit on the condo balcony, sit on the beach, drink white wine out of a Chardonnay glass or drink white wine out of a one-liter sippy-lid souvenir cup, and catch up.
The last time we’d gotten together as a group was ten years ago–my four childhood friends carpooling over from Atlanta and Athens, and me flying down from New York City–so we respected Vicki’s wishes.
As we respected Ellen’s wish to run on the beach at dawn like she was reenacting Chariots of Fire (which nobody else did). And Heather’s wish to play Cards Against Humanity (which four out of five of us did). And Paige’s wish to wear matching woven friendship bracelets (which we all did). And my wish to go to a water park (which two of us did).
When Paige and I arrived at Shipwreck Island, we were self-conscious about barefooting around in our one-pieces in the broadest of daylight, but then we saw a nine-months-pregnant woman in a bikini, and her meemaw in a thong. Awash in a sea of botched tattoos and bullet wounds, third-degree sunburns and cellulite that made our cellulite feel good about itself, we stood up a little straighter and wore our particular brand of sunscreened and soft-cupped middle age like Bob Mackie gowns.
Braving the Raging Rapids ride, we sat ass backwards into inner tubes held by beautiful bronzed teenagers.
I said to one good-ole-boy Adonis: “You’re gonna have to push me.”
He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and shoved me over a waterfall like a sack of dirty sheets down a hotel laundry chute.
I screamed.
And Paige screamed. Because she too is a screamer. And Paige’s screams have always enabled my screams. Ever since elementary school.
Paige and I met in the 1970s Alabama gifted program. I don’t know why we were pegged as gifted, but I’m pretty sure I scored high on the IQ test because when I was asked to name all the words I could think of in sixty seconds, I read every word I could see on book spines behind the test giver’s back.
“Dictionary, encyclopedia, parachute, penguin.”
From then on, one day a week, me (and another kid from Alberta Elementary School) and Paige (and another kid from Arcadia Elementary School) went to gifted school at Northington Elementary with twenty other kids from around Tuscaloosa.
Here’s what I remember about being gifted: logic puzzles (whodunit spreadsheets), Chisanbop (finger math), and our teacher’s belief that we, a bunch of fifth graders, could put on a show (three acts from, you guessed it, Evita, A Chorus Line, and The Crucible).
Paige remembers: “I was one of the extras, and I think my one line was ‘It’s up there, behind the rafters,’ pointing at a witch or a bat.”
It was my line too.
For Arthur Miller’s big courtroom scene, Paige and I played Puritan schoolgirls. But we didn’t point at a bat. Costumed in black dresses with white collars and bonnets, we cowered on a cafeteria stage screaming and crying and accusing another girl of turning into a yellow devil bird that wanted to tear our faces off.
Vicki, who’s known Paige since kindergarten, attended that show with her mother. She remembers thinking “Whaaaaat?”
Paige and I still don’t know what. All we remember is that we got those parts because we were the best screamers. Looking back, “the best screamers” might have been our teacher’s southern lady way of saying that we were the worst actresses. Regardless, one good screamer holds tight to another for life.
At the water park, Paige and I screamed flying down the rapids, we screamed bumping into each other, we screamed seeing each other scream, and we screamed getting stuck and spiraling in whirlpools.
Every fifteen feet, another good-ole-boy Adonis unstuck us and slung us along.
We screamed, “Thank you!”
They said, “Yes, ma’am.” And shook their heads in what I am sure was marvel over never having seen grown-ass ladies such as ourselves having more fun than little girls pumped up on 16 Handles fro-yo chasing Taylor Swift through a shopping mall.
Paige and I drifted along the Lazy River, congealed with season ticket holders. We got in the Wave Pool and gripped the sides like castaways. We climbed what I believe was in fact a rickety wooden stairway to heaven to ride White Knuckle River, which is four people in a big inner tube going down a 660-foot twisting snake of drainpipe. And we debated the Tree Top Drop, which is a seventy-foot slide down an XXXL human–size straw.
I asked a woman who’d just finished it, “Should we ride the Tree Top Drop?”
She said, “If you wanna taste the crotch of your own bathing suit.”
We did not.
So instead, we went back to the Raging Rapids and rode it twenty-eight times in a row.
At some point, I asked Paige about the tattoo on her shoulder.
Paige’s tattoo is of what I would call three “M” birds. Three birds that look like the letter M. Inked in black without features, as if seen from a distance, flying high, maybe over an ocean. One is the width of a nickel; the other two, the widths of dimes. Mama bird and her babies. Soaring to safety.
Paige said, “I just came to the point where I felt really free. I felt free and thankful that me and the kids were in such a better place. I’d never even thought about wanting a tattoo before.”
Paige got that tattoo after she left her first husband, who we’d all known was a problem since high school.
Paige never spoke of what went on in her house when she was married to him, but she speaks to me of it now. And there are two things I am certain of: I will never forgive that man for what he did to my friend; and if Paige’s father hadn’t stepped in and saved her, my friend would not be here.
When Paige’s children were six and nineteen months old, her father, who was perfectly healthy, sat her down in a restaurant and said, “I will give you your inheritance of thirty thousand dollars now, if you leave him.” Within a month, Paige hired a moving company and got out while her husband was at work. The divorce was finalized a year later.
“Best decision ever,” she says.
Paige never looked back. And neither do we.
* * *
Let me give you a little rundown of who we are now.
Paige is a survivor. Vicki is a caregiver. Heather is religious. Ellen is such a feminist that when she married a man with her exact same last name, she insisted they hyphenate. At least, that’s what I told my husband, who having met Ellen, believed me and still calls them (and here, I will substitute a generic last name for the sake of their anonymity) the Doe-Does.
Me, I’m the funny one. My friends say that I have a special way of saying things, which means that when we’re together I revert to my adolescent ways of Shock and Aw-no-you-didn’t!
No matter how old we get, we see each other like we first saw each other: young. We forgive each other like we did when we were young: easily. We lean into every story because no story is too long, or too much, because we come together so rarely to share. We don’t judge each other’s baggage, and we don’t pack light.
To be continued… US
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| Dimensions | 1 × 5 × 8 in |
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