Last summer I read a book that I fell in love with.  In fact, I loved it deeply enough to blog about Lift here.  Lift was the second book that Kelly Corrigan had written, but it was the first one that I read.  Funny that it took me a whole year to seek out her first book, but I finally got around to reading it and I have to say, The Middle Place is lovely. Once again, I was totally blown away.  I love the way that Kelly can write about herself with such honesty.  She doesn’t paint a picture of a perfect person, but you she is real. The love she has for her father is so apparent in this book, as a fellow “Daddy’s girl,” I found it incredibly touching.

One concept that Kelly and I both live our lives by is this, “…don’t attach to marble countertops or the Burberry fall line.  But people? I say attach, wrap around, braid yourself into.  What’s the point of a life without attachments? We are our attachments.”

This was in response to the Buddhist idea that to eliminate suffering in life, you must break all attachments.  I am with Kelly on that one.  I choose suffering.

I want to write a book, and Kelly’s writing just makes me want it more.

When I was a child I remember noticing how many authors there were with the name Patricia.  It seemed totally disproportionate, the number of authors named anything else, to those named Patricia.  I also remember telling my mom to count on at least one more author named Patricia.  Here I am, thirty years old, and that is still the only thing that I can think of to “do” with my life that I know that I would enjoy, aside from the obvious wife/mother stuff that gets me though the days I spend feeling out-of-place in my life.  Is this what a midlife crisis feels like? if so, it looks like I am going to die young…