Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light

Essays

By: Helen Ellis

Narrated by: Helen Ellis

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.

"Ellis' prose is filled with so many laugh lines, you might want to go ahead and book the Botox.” —NPR

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.

Feels like a conversation with a friend

This book is delightful and insightful. It is read by the author and hits home on so many levels as a woman in my late thirties. I appreciated all the stories and characters and only wish that the author concluded the story with a little more, the ending felt abrupt. However, I look forward to reading more by this author.

lol fun

Loved this....so real...full of LOL moments....current. A must for every woman. I'm her people. thank you.

Laugh out loud funny

Short and sweet, funny and real. This book is probably geared toward women aged mid 30's to their 50's. I'm 42 and could definitely relate. I really enjoyed it and laughed out loud more than once. I will definitely be looking for other books by this author.

amusing & endearing

she tells it like it is & feels like girls night out sharing stories & laughs!

Awful

She uses one four letter word more in what I was able to struggle through than I’ve heard in my entire 55 years. I’m not sure what the story line is because every single conversation reverts back to her sex life. I bought the book a while ago and saw it in my library, wondering why I didn’t finish it… now I know why.