It’s a crazy idea: trying to name the phrases that make love and connection possible. But that’s just what Kelly Corrigan has set out to do here. In her bestselling memoirs, Corrigan distilled our core relationships to their essences. Now, in TELL ME MORE, she’s back with a deeply personal and often hilarious examination of the essential phrases that turn the wheel of life. With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand “the thing behind the thing,” Corrigan swings between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss.

When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” After college, Kelly took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting. But soon her savings dwindled, and she realized she needed a job. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, she suddenly heard her mother’s voice everywhere.