Glitter and Glue: A Memoir Author: Visit Amazon's Kelly Corrigan Page | Language: English | ISBN:
034553283X | Format: PDF
Glitter and Glue: A Memoir Description
Amazon.com Review
Kelly Corrigan on her new memoir
Glitter and GlueI’m Irish. That must be where the luck comes from, the luck required to find a publisher after filling diaries and journals for thirty years, first in a gingham wonderland from Sears, then in a dorm room in Virginia, finally in a fixer-upper near Oakland, California.
My first book, The Middle Place, was about my father, Greenie, who was very sick at the same time that I was very sick. Next, in 2010, I tried to capture what it has been to my daughters’ mother in Lift. Finally, with Glitter and Glue, my mother gets her due. Now, Mary Corrigan is a complicated topic, as most mothers are. Think stoic, gritty, unbending; one part saint, two parts sergeant. Or, as she put it, “Your father’s the glitter, but I’m the glue. It takes both, Kelly.”
I hope that somehow, given the toppling pile of books on your nightstand, you can find an evening to spare for this story of how I came to wonder who my mom was before I arrived, what motherhood had done to her and who she had become since I left home. Parenthood is so distorting; we all deserve a second, longer look.
From Booklist
When mother of two Corrigan struggles with cancer, she remembers a mother she never met more than 20 years earlier in 1992 in Australia. Back then, seeking money to enhance the next leg of her round-the-world travels, Corrigan became the nanny for a widower, John, whose family—five-year-old Martin and seven-year-old Milly as well as a garage-living stepson and an in-law-apartment-living father-in-law—had just lost their matriarch to cancer. Though it’s a true story, Corrigan has changed the names and some of the details to disguise identities. Here, the memories of her work as companion, surrogate mom, and onetime lover to various family members are filtered through Corrigan’s experiences, good and bad, of herself as mother and herself as daughter (her mom’s admonitions and pronouncements, served up in italics, support the young nanny as well as the text, then and now). The flavor of what a youthful, journal-writing Corrigan probably once hoped this book would be—a spectacle of travel and awesome experience—comes through in the writing but doesn’t disturb this touching, hard-won paean to mothering and parenting, living and losing. --Eloise Kinney
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- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 034553283X
- ISBN-13: 978-0345532831
- Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Kelly Corrigan is a new author for me, but I will be seeking out her other works, as I was very impressed with "Glitter and Glue." This memoir was nothing like I was expecting from what I understood of the book when it picked it up -- I thought it was going to be a typical memoir of the author's childhood, with many stories of the differences between the author's mother and father. Corrigan's father is the "glitter" of the family and the title, but he hardly appears at all in the book -- he is the perpetual cheerleader for his daughter, always supportive and never critical. Corrgian's mother, on the other hand, described herself as the "glue" of the family, the practical, and generally critical, mother who rarely seemed to support any plan or scheme of her daughter.
But, the book is not much as I thought it would be -- rather the contrast of the mother and father are explored primarily in Corrigan's story of her 1992 summer in Australia when she was a young nanny to a family whose wife and mother had recently died of cancer. Corrigan had always assumed that when she married and had children she would be their glitter, and instead she found herself in a complex situation where there were no easy answers. The Australian family consisted of the father (older and an airline pilot), two young children (the names are not the same as the real life family), the father's stepson,and his father-in-law. In attempting to bond with the children, Corrigan finds that it was not simply a matter of indulging youngsters who missed their mother -- in fact there is very little discussion between Corrigan and the children about the mother related in the book, as most of that information comes from Evan, the stepson.
This memoir concentrates on a piece of Kelly Corrigan’s life in which she seems to come of age. From her own description, she seems to have been a contrarian child, not eager to please her mother, far closer to, and more accepting of, her father. After graduation from college, she lived with her grandmother, saved her money and set off to travel with a friend. Unfortunately, she didn’t plan her trip well enough and soon ran out of money. She needed to work, but the only job that she could get that would pay her under the table was that of a nanny, and this was not how she saw herself.
Working for a widower, his motherless children, stepson and father-in-law, was an eye-opening experience for Kelly. She suddenly realized what a responsibility it was to be a parent, but mainly how hard it was to be a mother and how empty someone’s life could be without one. As she got to know the children and extended family, and began to interact more and more with them, she came to understand the enormity of the task. It was daunting, and she wondered if she was up to it. Suddenly, she began to appreciate all her mother had done for her and to understand why she did certain things that she once disagreed with vehemently.
Growing up, Kelly was closer to her father, and she did not particularly like her mother’s parenting skills. Her mother was a no-nonsense figure who made the rules and set the standards to be followed. Her father was the softie, the Yin to her mother’s Yang. Her mother told Kelly that her father was the glitter and she was the glue, and from that, the title was born. As Kelly began to mature into a responsible adult, she became more and more like her mother and understood the value of having both the glue and the glitter in one’s life.
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