Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light Essays

The bestselling author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code returns with a viciously funny, deeply-felt collection of literary essays on love, family, and friendship among grown-ass women. When Helen Ellis and her lady gang arrive for their vacation at the Redneck Riviera they bring a lot with them: stories of five husbands, past and present, seven kids, lost parents, lost jobs, a bad diagnosis, and enough gin and powdered onion dip mix to dehydrate an elephant. Because that's friendship among women old enough to appreciate it: a tapestry woven in the colors of your forties, Clinique moisturizer yellow, Windex blue, and colonoscopy pink. In these twelve gloriously comic and moving essays, Helen Ellis braves a cat lady plastic surgeon for twenty shots of stomach bile in the neck, witnesses the Miracle Whip of life as her 49-year-old second-best friend gives birth, sobs with a stadium full of women as a psychic with a tiara of white blond hair exorcises their sorrows, 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 chockablock with fabulous characters: Book club ladies who race Roombas, poker players with backpacks of cash, a man who plays the saw, a woman who wears a toilet paper cast on her arm, Southern boy Adonises, garage sale swindlers, and ladies so tipsy they lose their handbags and have to carry their keys in a Piggly Wiggly shopping bag. Alive with the fearless, sensational humor that won Helen Ellis legions of fans, her fierce wit is accompanied in this book by a brave vulnerability, an emotional generosity, and a ferocious love for her friends that takes this acclaimed author to a whole new level of accomplishment.