Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: It’s Okay to Laugh
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): McInerny, Nora
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.noraborealis.com/
CITY: Minneapolis
STATE: MN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adamdavis/5-great-books-to-read-in-may?utm_term=.bcYb6J5O5#.aaQ4GgNoN * http://time.com/4376810/social-media-death-dying/ * https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062419378/its-okay-to-laugh
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Aaron Joseph Purmort (deceased); children: Ralph.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Previously worked in advertising.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications and Web sites, including Minneapolis Star Tribune, Time, Cosmopolitan, Elle, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and Slate.
SIDELIGHTS
Nora McInerny Purmort is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has written articles that have appeared in publications including the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Time, as well as online at the Cosmopolitan, Elle, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and Slate Web sites.
In 2016, Purmort released a memoir about her husband’s death called It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too): A Memoir. In this volume, she describes how she met Aaron, the man who would become her husband. When the two became a couple, they were inseparable. However, Aaron was diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer just one year later. They married and had a son, all while Aaron fought cancer. Purmort recalls the moment Aaron died and tells of how she has managed since losing him.
In an article she wrote for Time, Purmort commented on her generation’s difficulty in dealing with death and other difficult life events. She stated: “I am from a generation (not quite a Millennial, not a gen-xer), that is prepared for anything: we have steadfastly contributed to our 401(k)s, gone to therapy to correct the damage our parents inflicted on us in the 80s, read Lean In. But we’re still completely disarmed in the face of actual hardship. And that includes me, too.” Purmort continued: “This is the part where I tell you I’ve posted a very heartfelt tribute about my friend’s dead son on Facebook, but I’ve yet to go see her in person. Watching someone’s life and death from the safe distance of your phone screen is one thing. Stopping by to see a dying person is quite another.” Purmort told Erin Kodicek, contributor to the Omnivoracious Web site: “I was lucky to have had twenty-seven years of unremarkable, unremitting pleasantness. But I’m lucky now, too. Because I got to fall in love so deeply. Because I was able to see my person to the edge of this world and into the next. … Because all of the darkness helped me appreciate the light when I saw it again.”
Reviewing Purmort’s book on the Buzzfeed Web site, Adam Davis asserted, “It’s Okay to Laugh is that rare gem of a read, equal parts heartwarming and hysterical.” A critic on the Reading to Unwind Web site suggested: “This book is an amazing memoir. … Nora writes with humor, which … makes the story move along as well as makes it readable without balling your eyes out because honestly she has dealt with some horrible losses that could paralyze some people’s lives. Everyone takes loss differently and grieves differently; her approach is one with humor that might allow her to get through this period in her life.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Purmort, Nora McInerny, It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too): A Memoir, Dey St., 2016.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, June 6, 2016, Carolyn Juris, review of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too), p. 10.
ONLINE
Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/ (May 2, 2016), Adam Davis, review of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too).
Nora McInerny Purmort Home Page, http://www.noraborealis.com (March 22, 2017).
Omnivoracious, http://www.omnivoracious.com/ (May 27, 2016), Erin Kodicek, author interview.
Reading to Unwind, http://readingtounwind.blogspot.com/ (April 1, 2016), review of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too).
Time Online, http://time.com/ (June 27, 2016), Nora McInerny Purmort, “We Live on the Internet. We Die Alone.”
Nora McInerny Purmort
Nora McInerny Purmort
Biography
Nora McInerny Purmort was voted Most Humorous by the Annunciation Catholic School Class of 1998. It was mostly downhill after that, but she did get to spend three glorious years married to Aaron Joseph Purmort (aka Spider-Man). Her work has appeared on TIME, Cosmopolitan.com, Elle.com, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Slate, and in the Star Tribune. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her son, Ralph. They really like it there.
QUOTED: "I am from a generation (not quite a Millennial, not a gen-xer), that is prepared for anything: we have steadfastly contributed to our 401(k)s, gone to therapy to correct the damage our parents inflicted on us in the 80s, read Lean In. But we’re still completely disarmed in the face of actual hardship. And that includes me, too."
"This is the part where I tell you I’ve posted a very heartfelt tribute about my friend’s dead son on Facebook, but I’ve yet to go see her in person. Watching someone’s life and death from the safe distance of your phone screen is one thing. Stopping by to see a dying person is quite another."
We Live On the Internet. We Die Alone.
Nora McInerny Purmort
Jun 27, 2016
Ideas
Nora McInerny Purmort is the author of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too)
A good way to become very popular is to be on your deathbed. Everyone wants to stop by, drop off a casserole (I’m in the Midwest), say the deep and meaningful things they always meant to say, have a poignant moment, a cinematic hand squeeze.
A deathbed is really not the time for that, though. If you’re worried about making sure people know how you feel, go ahead and do that right now. This can wait. But once Aaron was admitted to hospice care at age 35 our phones kept dinging and buzzing and lighting up with messages from long-absent friends and long-lost family near and far who suddenly and urgently needed to be a part of my husband’s death.
At first, I tried to be a good messenger.
“Aaron,” I whispered to him after my phone lit up with an offer for a casserole from a couple we’d last seen 18 months before, “the so-and-so’s want to stop by to see you. What do you think?”
Play Video
Inside One Doctor's Fight for the Right to Die
Daniel Swangard, an anesthesiologist, wants the option to end his life on his own terms
Aaron lolled his head from side to side, his eyes struggling to find focus, like a broken doll.
“No.” he finally sighed, and slipped back into the gray space between this world and the next.
INNOVATION
Stop Subsidizing Driving
Aaron was always popular. And not because he was a cookie-cutter Popular Person. In high school, he was a skater punk with pierced ears who ended up as Prom King. He was a well-loved fixture in the Minneapolis ad community, and known for standing in the back of company photos and taking off his shirt. He was also just a genuinely really nice human. For the first year we dated, there wasn’t a place in Minneapolis we could go without him running into a friend. A friend, to Aaron, was anyone he’d ever met. Old classmates from grammar school, one-time colleagues from many jobs ago, people he’d met through friends of friends of friends at Karaoke night. Once he was diagnosed with brain cancer, the circle widened: hospital administrators and nurses would stop us at brunch or on runs around Minneapolis to say hello.
That was Aaron’s nature: to make people feel loved and accepted, no matter how small a part they played in his life.
A blog I started during his sickness extended that circle to thousands of strangers around the world, who followed our little family through two brain surgeries, more chemo than I can count, one beautiful baby born and one lost.
Our email and Facebook inboxes were filled with strangers around the world who were going through some version of what we were going through, or who weren’t, but appreciated the opportunity to try on some hard feelings before they had gone through any life disasters.
But as that virtual circle got bigger, the real-life circle grew smaller. Like Jay Gatsby, we had plenty of people show up for the flashy stuff: a wedding that was crashed by dozens of acquaintances and watched virtually by hundreds of people around the world, a funeral/party for Aaron in a cavernous art gallery that was packed with people I hadn’t seen since that wedding, some of whom had stood up beside us as our wedding party.
I am from a generation (not quite a Millennial, not a gen-xer), that is prepared for anything: we have steadfastly contributed to our 401(k)s, gone to therapy to correct the damage our parents inflicted on us in the 80s, read Lean In. But we’re still completely disarmed in the face of actual hardship. And that includes me, too. This is the part where I tell you I’ve posted a very heartfelt tribute about my friend’s dead son on Facebook, but I’ve yet to go see her in person.
Watching someone’s life and death from the safe distance of your phone screen is one thing. Stopping by to see a dying person is quite another. Hard things are hard to see, and many people who had loved Aaron chose not to see us, not really. Where we’d expected that big group of friends to keep us company, we had a very small group of friends who showed up for Game of Thrones on the couch and dinner in the hospital. We had a few people who weren’t afraid to hear the real answer when they asked “how are you?” And everyone else drifted away, appearing in the form of Instagram likes and Facebook shares, texted well wishes that could be delivered without awkward silence or eye contact, without the messy exchange of emotions. And I didn’t notice their absence until they were there trying to elbow their way back in to the most personal moment in our lives.
Dying is private, intimate. There is no such thing as a peaceful death, or a natural one. We are drugged from this world to the next, and our bodies fight violently to live, even when it is a lost cause. I could see Aaron’s heart beat through his chest. His body jerked with breath, long after he’d lost consciousness.
Dying is not an occasion for you to stop by to unburden yourself of things unsaid and things undone. The dying person does not care. They have more pressing matter to attend to. Aaron spent nine days between this world and the next. His big green eyes, once so lively, were unfocused and wet. The brain tumor had clipped his speech and paralyzed the left side of his body, his olive skin had turned gray, his limbs were little more than bone and skin, like the elderly men we’d seen wasting away in their hospital beds on the oncology floor, who looked as though their beds were about to swallow them up. I went, in four short years, from Aaron’s Internet crush to his girlfriend to his wife to his caretaker, the last one being my greatest horror and my greatest honor, the one with secrets I’ll keep forever.
That is not an easy thing to explain to people who have suddenly decided it is time to grace your threshold with their presence. It is not Instagram-friendly to post about how your lively, jovial husband can no longer swallow pain medication, so you carefully squeeze a dropper of methadone into the corners of his mouth every few hours. You do not feel like Tweeting about how his breath is ragged and rattly, a death rattle. You know that from the movies. And Facebook is not the place to let people know that your house smells like death and you don’t give a shit about dinner.
“Why did you wait until now?” I wanted to reply, “You should have had FOMO when he was sitting on the couch in a chemo haze, looking at Instagram photos of you all out at parties you hadn’t invited him to!”
But I know that they waited because they didn’t know how to do show up, outside of double-tapping their phone screens. They didn’t know how to cross the line between the public documenting of our lives on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, and the private hell we’d been wading through.
It doesn’t matter, though, who showed up and who didn’t. It wouldn’t have changed the inevitable outcome.
Aaron’s and my experience hadn’t felt lonely, because it wasn’t. We were the center of one another’s worlds, and we had each other. Our online personas were not a lie, but like everything in social media, they weren’t the whole truth, either. It was our lives cropped into a series of square photographs, condensed into 140 characters, summarized in neat blog entries and Facebook posts. It was an attempt to organize the frenetic horror of illness and death, to manage all of the noise inside and around us into something palatable for everyone else.
Aaron died in my arms on November 25, alone in the house we’d shared. I’d told our family and friends, who had been keeping us company and wiping my kitchen counters and getting me drunk enough to sleep at night, that they needed to leave. Our family needed to be alone again, to go through this last phase together. That is the natural order of things, for your circle to get smaller and smaller. Our son, not yet two, climbed into bed alongside his father and kissed him. “Guh-bye!” he said, “I luh you!” and climbed down to the floor to toddle out of the room. It was me and Aaron, alone in bed, the way it was each night and every morning. Outside, the world moved along in its usual way. Inside our house, the only sound was Aaron’s breathing. And then it was quiet.
IT'S OKAY TO LAUGH
IT'S OKAY TO LAUGH
Nora McInerny Purmort is the mother of Ralphie, the author of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too), and the host of the forthcoming American Public Media podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, which launches November 2016.
NORA MCINERNY PURMORT
A (VERY TALL) WRITER IN MINNEAPOLIS.
A super tall, super cool writer. My first book was published in May 2016 by HarperCollins Dey Street, and I am probably never going to be done bragging about that, because I still like to tell people about being voted Most Humorous by my 8th grade class.
QUOTED: "I was lucky to have had 27 years of unremarkable, unremitting pleasantness. But I’m lucky now, too. Because I got to fall in love so deeply. Because I was able to see my person to the edge of this world and into the next. ... Because all of the darkness helped me appreciate the light when I saw it again."
Life Ain't Always Instagram-Friendly: Nora McInerny Purmort on "It's Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too)"
Erin Kodicek on May 27, 2016
Share
It's Ok to LaughLife was just dandy for Nora McInerny Purmort until she turned 27. Sure, she was jumping from job to job, but she had an amazing boyfriend, who would soon become her fiancé...after he was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer. I know--womp, womp, right? But that's the thing--Nora and Aaron didn't let this tragic news get them down. Instead, they proceeded to pack a happy lifetime into the three short years they ended up having together. Ms. Purmort's candid and surprisingly hilarious memoir, It's Okay to Laugh, reminds of how we should embrace our one wild and precious life, despite the lemons it inevitably deals.
The thing about Terrible Things is that they always happen to someone else. They are things that happen to your friend’s friend’s dentist, your roommate’s cousin’s coworker, your mom’s boyfriend’s daughter. Until they happen to you.
I get it, because until I was 27, nothing had happened to me. My life, aside from manageable adult acne and a struggle with finding a pair of skinny jeans to fit my calves, had been pretty easy up until that point.
So I wasn’t exactly prepared when my totally healthy, handsome boyfriend of a year had a seizure that turned out to be a brain tumor that ended up being stage IV brain cancer. This wasn’t my life, wiping crusted blood from the STAPLES in my boyfriend’s head. This wasn’t my life, meeting with an oncologist and nodding along to works like “radiation mask” and “glioblastoma multiforme.” My life was a pretty easy job in advertising, a little house we’d just moved into together, a dumb dog who barked at me if I wore a baseball cap, a boy I planned to marry.
All of this other stuff? It was a rude interruption, and I needed for it to be over.
Nope. As most adults know, life doesn’t actually work that way. And the terrible things are as much a part of your life as the great things.
We know it, cognitively, that life isn’t fair. But we also sort of believe that the rules don’t apply to us, that if we live our lives well, if we’re really good, we can get through life without any interruptions to our regularly scheduled happiness.
But the statistics are against us: our loved ones have a 100% chance of dying. And shit happens every day. The one sure thing in life is that something terrible is going to happen to you.
And I don’t mean that as a bummer. I mean it as a pep talk. Aaron and I had a really, really good life together, even if it was way too short. We had a three-year marriage that was the definition of “better or worse, sickness and health, ‘til death do us part.” We made a beautiful child. We saw Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in concert. And we also went through two brain surgeries, a miscarriage, a billion chemo and radiation appointments, ambulance rides through rush hour traffic, seizures at the dinner table.
You know what that is? It’s life. All of it. And even though the weddings and babies and Beyonce concerts are way more Instagram-friendly, it’s all worth keeping your eyes open for.
I was lucky to have had 27 years of unremarkable, unremitting pleasantness. But I’m lucky now, too. Because I got to fall in love so deeply. Because I was able to see my person to the edge of this world and into the next. Because the Internet brought me hundreds and hundreds of people who saw my Terrible Thing and said, “it happened to me, too, here is a virtual hug.” Because all of the darkness helped me appreciate the light when I saw it again.
It's Okay to Laugh
Carolyn Juris
Publishers Weekly. 263.23 (June 6, 2016): p10.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
It's Okay to Laugh
Nora McInerny Purmort
#16 Hardcover Nonfiction
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Purmort was 27 when her boyfriend was diagnosed with brain cancer; her memoir discusses his illness, their marriage, and the three years they had together.
Juris, Carolyn
QUOTED: "It’s Okay to Laugh is that rare gem of a read, equal parts heartwarming and hysterical."
5 Great Books To Read In May
Some of the recent favorites we’ve reviewed in the BuzzFeed Books newsletter.
posted on May 2, 2016, at 3:00 p.m.
Adam Davis
Adam Davis
BuzzFeed Staff
It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort
Dey Street Books
Dey Street Books
Heed the title of Nora McInerny Purmort’s memoir It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too) — because you’re in for an emotional rollercoaster of the highest order. In 2014, Purmort lost both her husband and father to cancer and miscarried her second child, all within a few weeks of each other. This book is her reckoning with those losses, cut through with abundant humor and heart. In the tradition of Bossypants and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Purmort turns an unabashedly honest and self-deprecating eye to her family and herself, plumbing her childhood, motherhood, “hot young widow”-hood, and more for endless unexpected lessons and laughs. Nothing is off the table — first kisses and flat butts, cafeteria Catholicism, bad dad jokes, deadly brain tumors, and beyond. It’s Okay to Laugh is that rare gem of a read, equal parts heartwarming and hysterical, that’ll make you laugh out loud — only to leave you tearing up a few pages later. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
—Lincoln Thompson
QUOTED: "This book is an amazing memoir. ... Nora writes with humor, which ... makes the story move along as well as makes it readable without balling your eyes out because honestly she has dealt with some horrible losses that could paralyze some peoples lives. Everyone takes loss differently and grieves differently her approach is one with humor that might allow her to get through this period in her life."
Friday, April 1, 2016
It's Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) - Nora McInerny Purmort (Book Review)
28386937
It's Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort
Genres: Memoir, Humor, Family
Publication date: May 24, 2016
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Format: eARC, 288 pages
How I got it: Edelweiss ARC Request
Buy it: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
My rating: 5/5
Joining the ranks of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Carry On, Warrior, a fierce, hysterically funny memoir that reminds us that comedy equals tragedy plus time.
Twentysomething Nora McInerny Purmort bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend and job to job. Then she met Aaron, a charismatic art director and her kindred spirit. They made mix tapes (and pancakes) into the wee hours of the morning. They finished each other's sentences. They just knew. When Aaron was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer, they refused to let it limit their love. They got engaged on Aaron's hospital bed and married after his first surgery. They had a baby when he was on chemo. They shared an amazing summer filled with happiness and laughter. A few months later, Aaron died in Nora's arms in another hospital bed. His wildly creative obituary, which they wrote together, touched the world.
Now, Nora shares hysterical, moving, and painfully honest stories about her journey with Aaron. It's OK to Laugh explores universal themes of love, marriage, work, (single) motherhood, and depression through her refreshingly frank viewpoint. A love letter to life, in all of its messy glory, and what it's like to still be kickin', It's OK to Laugh is like a long chat with a close friend over a cup of coffee (or chardonnay).
..............................................................................
My thoughts:
This book is an amazing memoir, I couldn't put it down I had to keep reading till the end. Nora writes with humor, which I think makes the story move along as well as makes it readable without balling your eyes out because honestly she has dealt with some horrible losses that could paralyze some peoples lives. Everyone takes loss differently and grieves differently her approach is one with humor that might allow her to get through this period in her life.
I didn't know of Nora's story prior to reading this book I had just read the synopsis on Edelweiss and requested the book. I am so glad that I got approved and was able to read this book. The story follows Nora's life through the different stages. I loved how brutally honest she is in the book, her writing style makes you want to continue reading. Also, the book is not really in a particular order we get events and details of her life not in the order they occurred. I loved this because I think towards the end she personally got deeper on the issues and brought the reader in to wanting to read more.
I loved how Nora gave the attitude of it is ok for you not to have your life in order during the grieving process and each day you are just trying to figure out how to get through the day. Another part of the book that I loved was she didn't leave details out. I felt like I got the whole picture of her life before and after her miscarriage, father's death, and husband's death. She gave the reader the chance to see her whole life and not feel like you were missing out on something that happened.
Also, I give Nora a large amount of credit, she not only is grieving, but is still raising her son and being a single mother. She never really complained in the book and felt bad for herself, she just kept writing and working on herself. She took the approach to grieving that one could hope to take as it hurts everyday, but you will get through this.
I suggest this as an anytime read. I read it on a longer plane ride and I was very happy since I am not sure I would have been able to put the book down. The chapters are short so you can easily pick this book up at any time and read a chapter. The book to me was very emotional to read so be prepared to go up and down through your emotions.
I received this from an Edelweiss ARC Request for the purpose of providing an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
..............................................................................
About the Author
Nora McInerny Purmort is the creator of a blog called My Husband's Tumor (listed on Tumblr's 'Big in 2014' list) and co-creator of her son Ralph, who she is currently raising to avenge his father's untimely death. Nora has been published in The Washington Post, Glamour UK, USA Today and The Huffington Post. She has also appeared on The Today Show and All Things Considered. Twitter: @noraborealis. Instagram: @noraborealis. Visit myhusbandstumor.com.