Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge

January 1, 2023

The New York Times best-selling author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code, Alabama-born Ellis lives in a New York apartment that really does have a coral lounge, so vibrant that someone left her a sticky note asking for the color. Here she recalls the lounge as refuge during the pandemic.

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April 15, 2023
Life and marriage can be difficult and hilarious, as these short essays demonstrate. The chapter titles in this collection by novelist Ellis give a good indication of the tone throughout--e.g., "My Husband Snores and Yours Will Too," "Slumber Party Side Effects May Include...," and "How To Talk About Touchy Subjects." Most of the pieces are whimsical with an edge, with the author holding forth on topics such as her marriage to a Greek American husband, her Alabama upbringing, her life among the New York literati, her fondness for grudges ("I love my shit list. If I had the nerve to type it, I'd laminate it"), and more. In the chapter on her husband's snoring, Ellis chronicles her attempts to block it out. One tactic was to have him sleep in their TV room, which they call the Coral Lounge because "we painted it a delirious shade of coral that borders on Starburst candy orange." In a memorable piece on wedding calamities, the author writes that she was late for her own wedding because she couldn't get a taxi in midtown Manhattan, and two nights before the ceremony, "the Greek restaurant where we'd booked our reception had burnt to the ground." In "A Woman Under the Influence of Joan Collins's Dynasty," Ellis notes that she binge-watched the prime-time soap because "I want to live like a 1980s TV villainess." As with many essay collections, some lines are excellent while others feel forced. Unfortunately, this one has more than its share of clunkers. For example, "I want a sex drive that rivals a Chevrolet dealership." This book is for readers who appreciate passages like this one about the revitalization of the author's sex life after her husband started taking Viagra: "How can I put this? I haven't seen Star Wars since the 1970s, but I know enough to recognize a lightsaber in my hand." Hit-or-miss comic essays on marriage and its discontents.

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April 17, 2023
Novelist Ellis (Bring Your Baggage) serves up irreverent essays about married life in all its less-than-glamorous glory. The author finds humor in the mundane, the semi-ridiculous (an extended email to a cat-sitter, full of painstaking detail for caring for an 16-year-old feline), and the sweet (on a not very successful attempt to cook moussaka, “the recipe equivalent of translating War and Peace,” for her husband: “We are married now because he ate that then”). Elsewhere, she rhapsodizes about Viagra and comments on the ways married sex has defied her expectations (“If someone told me... that the best sex I’d ever have would be in my fifties with my fiftysomething-year-old husband, I’d never have believed them”) and reminisces on her “last first kiss” with her husband, which the two recall differently (“This is how memory works in a happy marriage.... We are writing our own love story”). While one or two pieces feel incongruous, including a jokey, underbaked bit on housecleaning, Ellis’s writing is on balance assured, charming, and laced with an understated humor that nearly always hits its mark—as when she describes her injured, Percocet-medicated mother at her sister’s wedding, “mingling in broken English” with a man she thought she didn’t know but who turned out to be her cousin. This delights.

June 1, 2023
In this collection, prolific essayist and fiction author Ellis (Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light, 2021) offers her trademark wry observations on relationships, friendships, and modern society. Two themes quickly emerge: first, don't mess with her, whether she's happily updating the massive sticker-book chronicle of her life or binge-watching Dynasty, and second, she is deeply, completely, and utterly in love with her husband. Running up to 15 pages or so, her pieces offer a satisfying collection of stand-up comedy routines, relatable anecdotes about family and friends, and contemplative pieces on the mysteries of romance. And sex. Ellis gets into some nitty-gritty details and can be delightfully crude, but she never crosses the line into really crass. (Ellis might find this last observation depressing, but it's true.) She's also never really mean, even when she's gleefully recounting wedding-day calamities or listing the personal peccadilloes of loved ones. Her stories build on each other and occasionally meander, making cover-to-cover perusal or just skipping around equally effective. Readers will appreciate her fun, cheerful, and optimistic outlook.

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