For the next few months, I am going to do a brief recap of some powerful parenting (with educational topics) books I’ve read.
Sometimes reading quotes from books helps shift my mindset on certain topics and gets me focused on what’s really important when raising children.
Book Title: Tell me More
Author: Kelly Corrigan
Book Synopsis:
It’s a crazy idea: trying to name the phrases that make love and connection possible. But that’s just what Kelly Corrigan has set out to do here. In her New York Times best-selling memoirs, Corrigan distilled our core relationships to their essences, showcasing a warm, easy storytelling style. Now, in Tell Me More, she’s back with a deeply personal, unfailingly honest, and often hilarious examination of the essential phrases that turn the wheel of life.
In “I Don’t Know”, Corrigan wrestles to make peace with uncertainty, whether it’s over invitations that never came or a friend’s agonizing infertility. In “No”, she admires her mother’s ability to set boundaries and her liberating willingness to be unpopular. In “Tell Me More”, a facialist named Tish teaches her something important about listening. And in “I Was Wrong”, she comes clean about her disastrous role in a family fight and explains why saying sorry may not be enough.
With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand “the thing behind the thing”, Corrigan swings between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss. With the streetwise, ever-relatable voice that defines Corrigan’s work, Tell Me More is a moving and meaningful take on the power of the right words at the right moment to change everything.
My Review:
Kelly Corrigan could write a terrible book and I would still read it. That’s because I love her honest storytelling. A large handful of books in this series are admired because I love when someone tells a personal story to make a point about the way life is. Kelly does this in a magical way that makes you laugh and cry all in the same chapter.
Top Quotes:
- “That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too – not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.”
- “Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.”
- “Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.”
- “There’s no greater gift than to help a child see their enoughness, their might.”
- “I try to be one of the exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable, who leave all the cages open. I tell myself: There’s so much that you don’t know, you can’t know, you aren’t ever going to know.”
- “Liberated by the simple act of saying no—which I submit is impressive for any woman, and downright radical for one raised in the Nice’n Easy generation—my mom had always been able to find outs where others could not. Looking back, I think it came down to her impressive willingness to be disliked and her utterly unromantic position that people should take serious—if not total—responsibility for their own happiness.”
For a taste of Kelly’s other titles:
- “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Glitter and Glue - “The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Glitter and Glue
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