Eireann Corrigan Quotes

“…we’ll both claim we want to die. But we’ll mean: Please someone convince us to stick around… Because last night, we stood on top of fourteen floors of suffering—from the maternity to the morgue. Hundreds of bed buckling beneath the weight of legitimate illness, thousands of plastic sacks of donated blood—we stood above all of it and did not leap” (38). The meaningful words of Eireann Corrigan speak volumes about her past experience growing up with an eating disorder. In her memoir she highlights many ideas of how she felt through not only her experiences, but also those of her boyfriend, Danny. The various poetic devices present within the story come together to create a deep and meaningful novel. Eireann Corrigan, author of the memoir, You

For instance, the novel reads, “… my right arm prickles and then numbs and my chest all of a sudden feels like it’s splintering, like inside some man is throwing his shoulder against a door again and again” (21). Corrigan’s anorexia often comes with dangerous consequences. It is evident in this excerpt that she is in a state of pain as she compares how she feels to being hit again and again by a man seemingly inside her. Although the reader is not able to experience her physical pain, they are able to understand to some extent the pain in which she is feeling. Poetic devices allow readers to recognize a character’s emotions by comparing it to a different circumstance. Likewise, the author wrote, “… I spread the local paper out on my kitchen table, looking for the movie listings and a slim column on the front page rose up: North Brunswick Man Shot and I only stopped to read it because that’s where you lived—in the sprawling neighborhood as secure and tended as a tiny national park…” (56). Corrigan’s old boyfriend, Danny, was known to be suicidal and one night decided to shoot himself in the head with a handgun. The bullet entered his head and ricocheted off his skull, narrowly missing his brain. For Corrigan, discovering this in her local paper came as quite a shock to her and she wondered how such an event could happen in a

For example, Corrigan said, “Sometimes he claimed the scar along his thigh indicated he was actually the biblical figure of Jacob. Jacob, the brother of Esau? Jacob, who wrestled God’s angel and lived” (80). Corrigan, in this excerpt from the novel, alluded to the bible story in Genesis. One who knows the story of Jacob and Esau would be able to make connections between those from that story and the characters in the book. This biblical allusion caused some readers to be able to make deeper connections in the novel but yet does not hinder the understanding of someone who does not recognize the reference. Corrigan also wrote, “You so easily remember the times I was Eurydice, when the ward’s locked door slid closed between us. Do not forget I also have been Orpheus, on my knees in the boat, asking all the devils for your face in the trees” (100). This allusion to Greek mythology aided the reader in understanding one of Corrigan’s central themes in her novel. In the story Orpheus was a poet who was able to entrance enemies with his singing and lyre playing. After his wife, Eurydice, was killed, he traveled to the underworld to rescue her. Corrigan writes that she and Danny took turns being both Eurydice and Orpheus in that one was doing the rescuing and one was being rescued. They were there for each other through their troubles and