Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light

The bestselling author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code returns with a viciously funny, deeply felt collection of essays on friendship among grown-ass women.
When Helen Ellis and her lifelong friends arrive for a reunion on the Redneck Riviera, they unpack more than their suitcases: stories of husbands and kids; lost parents and lost jobs; powdered onion dip and photographs you have to hold by the edges; dirty jokes and sunscreen with SPF higher than they hair-sprayed their bangs senior year; and a bad mammogram. It’s a diagnosis that scares them, but could never break their bond. Because women pushing fifty won’t be pushed around.
In these twelve gloriously comic and moving essays, Helen Ellis dishes on married middle-age sex, sobs with a theater full of women as a psychic exorcises their sorrows, gets twenty shots of stomach bile to the neck to get rid of her double chin, and gathers up the courage to ask, “Are you there, Menopause? It’s Me, Helen.”
A book that reads like the best cocktail party of your life, Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light is chockablock with fabulous characters: cat-lady plastic surgeons and waterpark Adonises; bridge ladies and poker players; platinum medallion fliers and Garage Sale Swindlers; forty-year-old divorcées; fifty-year-old new moms and still-young octogenarians. Alive with the sensational humor and ferocious love for her friends that won Helen Ellis legions of fans, this book has a raw vulnerability and an emotional generosity that takes this acclaimed author to a whole new level of accomplishment.

This discussion guide was written by Amy Root Clements and shared and sponsored in partnership with Penguin Random House.

Book club questions for Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light by Helen Ellis

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

As you met Helen Ellis’s childhood friends, what did you observe about the traits that have kept the group together throughout the decades, even though their personalities and experiences are so varied? Did they remind you of anyone in your world who has sustained you with a lifetime of adolescent humor?

When Helen and her friends rallied around Vicki during her treatment for breast cancer, what did they demonstrate about the best way to confront fear, including the fear of mortality?

Helen regales the reader with an appreciation for “characters.” In other parts of the book she shares a more strict view on manners. How do these two philosophies coexist in the book?

What would you have said to the receptionist who had never heard of Gloria Steinem in “She’s Young”? Describe a time when you had to explain a person, place, or thing to someone from a different generation.

When you read about Michelle’s experience in labor, how did you react as Helen gracefully played the role of second fiddle? What truths emerged about the many forms of female friendships that sustain us? What do you predict for Bella Madeline and the world she will inhabit when she is a grown woman herself?

What are the most interesting things you learned about Helen’s family by observing the offerings at the last garage sale? How did her parents shape her sense of humor, and her powers of observation?

Which lines in Helen’s creed resonated with you the most? Over the next week, jot down your own “I Believe” observations as they come to mind, crafting your personal collection of tenets.

Woven into Helen’s essay on her relationship to bus travel is a glimpse at her relationship with her husband. What does she illuminate about the process of selecting a traveling companion for life?

In the closing scene, Helen describes making a revision to her body, culminating in her Doubleday chin. What does the book ultimately say about our perceptions of our bodies and the way those perceptions change (or stay the same) as we grow older?

Discuss the book’s title. What are the most significant and most entertaining items in your personal baggage? As a girl growing up in the South during the 1970s, how was Helen’s history imbued with a particular flair? What are the key elements that shaped your own history? How does storytelling help you carry your baggage?

Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light Book Club Questions PDF

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A PureWow Best Beach Read of 2021
“Equal parts irreverent and poignant—a mirthful toast to friendship at middle age.” —Southern Living