Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge
Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Even twenty years into marriage, Helen Ellis’s husband still makes her heart pitter patter. The New York Times bestselling author paints a portrait of true romance for our times in these surprising, sexy, and hilariously frank essays about love, marriage, and her last first kiss.
"Ellis is one of our greatest living humorists, in the same league as Sedaris and Irby...A fascinating portrait of middle-aged love.” —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward
Welcome to the Coral Lounge, a room in Helen Ellis’s New York City apartment painted such an exuberant shade that a Peeping Tom left a sticky note asking for the color. It is in the Coral Lounge where all the parties happen: A game called “What’s in the box?” makes its uproarious debut, the Puzzle Posse pounces on a 500-piece jigsaw of a beheaded priest, and guests don blindfolds for a raucous bridal shower.
When the pandemic shuts down the city, the Coral Lounge becomes a place of refuge, where Helen and her husband binge-watch Joan Collins’s Dynasty, dote on two spoiled cats, and where Helen discovers that even twenty years into marriage, her husband still makes her heart pitter patter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
