Middle Place (Corrigan)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 16, 1967
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Richmond; M.F.A., San
   Francisco University
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area

Kelly Corrigan is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Edward Lichty, and their two daughters. She is a graduate of The University of Richmond and San Francisco State University (for a Masters in Literature).

Shortly after her own battle with breast cancer, she launched CircusOfCancer.org, a how-to web site for friends and family of women with the disease. The website includes a photo album of her own struggle against breast cancer and writings in such categories as “Finding a Lump” and “Losing My Hair.” Below is an excerpt from “Getting the Diagnosis”:

At 1pm, Emily Birenbaum called and said these exact words, "Kelly, I understand that you called in this morning. I have the biopsy report and Kelly, it's cancer." I called out: "Edward!" and he came to me and we crowded around the phone, politely asking the simplest of questions. "Is the test always correct?" "Does it say how much cancer there is?" "Could it be a false positive?" After a very short conversation where we learned the phrase 'invasive ductal carcinoma', we hung up. The girls were at our knees, needing to be fed and put down for a nap. There was so much to do, on so many fronts, that the only thing to do was to start doing.

Kelly is a newspaper columnist with columns appearing in print, online and notably in the January 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Her first book, The Middle Place, is a memoir about her Irish-American father’s battle with cancer and her own triumph over the disease. Published in 2008, the memoir became a New York Times bestseller.

Kelly is also the author of an essay about "women's remarkable capacity to support each other, to laugh together, and to endure." Publisher Hyperion/Voice videotaped Kelly as she read her essay and posted it on Youtube. It has recieved millions of views. (From Wikipedia and GoodReads.)