Summary of It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly: The Year of No Do-Overs

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly: The Year of No Do-Overs

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Mary Louise Kelly's new book, Operating Instructions meets Glennon Doyle, is about the year before her son goes to college and the joys, losses and surprises that happen along the way. She has always said "next year" to make it to her son's soccer games and carpool for her son Alexander. Now, James and Alexander are seventeen and fifteen, and Mary Louise realizes her older son will be leaving soon for college. Mary Louise is facing act three of her life with the death of her father. She is coming to grips with the reality of having aging parents and the questions of what she did right and wrong. This chronicle of her eldest child's final year at home is honest, funny, poignant, revelatory, and immensely relatable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jun 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215731536

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The narrator is struggling to write a short book due to being too busy in the newsroom. The agent suggests they write a short book about their son James, who is about to be a senior and is a starting striker on his high school varsity team. James is so messy that his younger brother gets grossed out by the chaos that he clears a space in the debris to lay out his uniform the night before a game. On weekdays at four p.m., NPR's All Things Considered goes on air. The most important details in this text are that the speaker is a working mother and that technology has made it possible for her to anchor a daily national news program from the bleachers.

She is also aware that the tug is just as strong when her baby is seventeen as when he is seven weeks or seven months. She has made a pact with herself that when the job and the kids collide, the kids come first. She also mentions that she has pushed back from the anchor chair in Studio 31, NPR’s main studio, in the middle of a live broadcast and announced to her cohost and to the startled director, I’ve got to go. The most important details in this text are that the author was a journalist before she was a parent, and that the hard calls that may come back to haunt her are the ones that accumulate in the vast gray space between the drama of a nurse tracking her down in Iraq and the routine Thursday afternoon unfolding of a high school soccer game. The author also acknowledges that not everyone reading this is a mother or a parent, and that there will never be enough hours in the day or years on this earth to do everything they came here to do. This is the last year that my firstborn is guaranteed to live under the same roof as me, and it is also the year I lost my dad and turned fifty.

I have no idea what the transition to an empty nest will look like, but I think of my life as a play, with Act I being my youth. The most important details in this text are that Act I is slow and builds to school, first love, college, grad school, first job, getting married, buying a car, and buying a house, while Act II is full of unscripted moments and ad-libs of silliness and simple wonder. Act III is the one where it dawns on the narrator that there may not be an infinite number of acts, and that they should make the most of this one.

CHANGING PLACES

The most important details in this text are that the narrator is on extended, unpaid leave from NPR and that Alexander is two years old and has yet to speak. At his annual checkup, the pediatrician tells the narrator that Alexander's speech is outside the normal range and that he needs intervention. The narrator is then sent home with three urgent to-do items: consult an audiologist, take Alexander to a pediatrician, and take Alexander to a pediatrician's office. Alexander needed intensive speech therapy, two or three days a week, two or three hours a day. His rate of progress would depend on how hard the parents worked with him the other twenty-three hours in a day.

The parents had an excellent nanny, but she didn't drive and English was her second language. The parents discussed asking their nanny to shepherd Alexander through intensive speech therapy, but it felt wrong. Nick made more money than the parents, and giving up his paycheck would involve more radical lifestyle changes than giving up theirs. The narrator is returning from maternity leave and is pushing a stroller down M Street when they spot Annie, a reporter from another news organization. They chat and Annie invites the narrator to play with her daughter around the same age as Alexander.

The narrator is surprised to learn that Annie has a daughter around the same age as Alexander. The narrator is surprised to learn that Annie has a daughter around the same age as Alexander. The narrator is surprised to learn that Annie has a daughter around the same age as Alexander. Annie and the narrator had been trying to land an interview at the White House for a long time, but Annie had not recognized them. The narrator went back to work to cover the Department of Defense, and Annie launched a writing consultancy business that allowed her to work from home.

When they bumped into each other again, Annie spied the narrator first and said they looked great. The narrator cried all day after that time, and they headed off to the park together. The most important details in this text are the author's takeaway from an encounter with a