Ballentine Books 2014
224 pages Memoir
I am in love with Glitter and Glue. I am in love with Kelly
Corrigan. Those who know my reviews know that I am prone to finding the good in
the books that I read, but Glitter and Glue is profound in ways that stretches
beyond the page into the memory and psyches of the reader.
Corrigan puts on paper the memory of a summer in her life
during the 1990s when she and a friend were backpacking in Australia and ran
out of money. They each take a nanny job with a Sydney family to earn enough
money to finish their trip. Corrigan's job is with an extended family, a father
and two young children who have just lost their mother to cancer. The household
also includes the mother's father and her young adult son from a former
marriage.
Like most 20-somethings, Corrigan is feeling very
independent from her parents, especially from her mother, who she feels to be too
no-nonsense, too demanding, too abrupt, too matter-of-fact. Father, who is
called Greenie, is everything that Mary, her mother, is not. He is positive,
loving, supportive, and encouraging. (Apparently, a previous memoir called The
Middle Place is about her father.) "If my mother thought of me as someone
to guide, my father thought of me as someone to cheer." Her mother told
her once, "You father is the glitter; I am the glue."
Corrigan arrives at the Tanner house when the household is
at their most vulnerable; their mother Ellie has just died and no one knows
quite how to handle things--emotions are still too raw. The seven-year-old
daughter Millie wants nothing to do with her and the five-year-old Martin just
wants someone to be his Mommy.
During the months that Corrigan works for the Tanner family,
she learns so much about mothering, but more importantly about her own mother.
She learns to appreciate her mother in new ways. After a particularly bad day
with Martin and Millie, she muses: "I see that, sturdy though my mother
was, she must have been gutted by the sound and sight and sheer vibration of her
rabid daughter roaring, I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOU FOR EVER!.
I
had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments but now I see that a
good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to
fall back in love with her child the next day." She learns that she will
never have a girly-girl relationship with her mother, but as she tries to
mother these motherless children, she finds herself wondering about what her
mother would do in any of a number of situations. As she works to help these
children through this crisis in their lives, she grows in innumerable ways and
becomes a woman rather than a girl.
As much as we think we know about our mothers, I am not sure
that any of us truly ever knew our
mothers, although my mother revealed more of herself than some other mothers I
knew. My favorite sentence in the book says as much: "But now I see there's
no such thing as a woman, one woman.
There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this
out sooner, but what child can see the woman inside her mom, what with all that
Motherness blocking out everything else."
Sometimes I think to myself,
"I'm becoming my mother." And then I feel pride, because my mother
was a remarkable woman, and I would love to "be" my mother.
I hadn't picked up Gllitter and Glue yet when I saw the following
video on Facebook. I remembered that the publisher had sent me the book to
review. I dug it out of the pile and finished it in a few hours. I cried over
the video and I cried over the book. That in itself may not be an endorsement,
but besides all the emotion, there are some extremely funny moments. Kelly
Corrigan is full of good humor and ascerbic wit. The combination makes for a
great read! Newsday calls it a "Valentine to Mom."
Kelly Corrigan's website: http://www.kellycorrigan.com/
Newsday review: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/kelly-corrigan-s-glitter-and-glue-valentine-to-mom-1.6912046
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