Glitter and Glue

September 16, 2013
Corrigan (The Middle Place) looks back on a transformative period in her life in the early 1990s. As a college grad determined to see the world and find adventure far from the safety net of her Philadelphia-based family (fans of her previous memoir have already met her outgoing dad, “Greenie,” and her more stoic mom Mary, the “glitter and glue”), she travels to Australia where she soon runs out of money and takes a temporary position as a nanny to two young children whose mother has passed away. Though disappointed to find herself in a mundane job in the suburbs, Corrigan is quickly drawn into the struggle of a family trying to carry on in the absence of its most “irreplaceable” member. As widower John Tanner, his young children, and his stepson Evan wind their way into young Kelly’s heart, she finds herself thinking more and more of her own mother’s voice, of her solid commitment to her children, husband, and faith, and of the lessons one can learn from ordinary life, “which are big, hard beautiful things.” Initially believing that “things happen when you leave the house,” the young Corrigan soon finds that life’s greatest dramas and deepest messages often unfold within the quiet underpinnings of relationships. The author’s fans and newcomers alike will welcome this story that probes the depths of mother-daughter bonds

January 1, 2014
Corrigan's third book (Lift, 2010, etc.) deals with the layered relationship between mother and daughter. The glitter refers to her father, George, her cheerleader, "almost impossible to frustrate or disappoint." The glue, her mother, Mary, with whom she had an "adversarial but functional" relationship, held things together with her pragmatism. After college, when Corrigan decided to go on a multicountry odyssey, her father responded, "Fantastic!" Her mother: "You should be using that money to get established, get your own health insurance, not traipse all over creation." Ironically, it was Corrigan's travels that led her to appreciate her mother's point of view. The author ran out of money in Australia and took a job as a live-in nanny for a widower. John Tanner hired her to look after his two children while he traveled for his job as an airline steward, but it was a dysfunctional household: There was John, who seldom smiled; Martin, the open, affectionate 5-year-old; Milly, the resentful 7-year-old; Pop, their 84-year-old grandfather; and Evan, John's grown stepson. "If this family were a poker hand, you'd fold," writes Corrigan. "Without that middle card, it's an inside straight, and those almost never work out." Aside from a friendly flirtation with Evan, the action is internal as Corrigan called upon her mother's directives to help her provide some stability for the family. The most affecting part of the narrative is her struggle to connect emotionally with Milly and her realization that "maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn't because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much." Written in a breezy style with humor and heart, the book reminds us how rewarding it can be to see a parent outside the context of our own needs. It's that illumination that allows Corrigan to turn what starts as a complaint about her mother into a big thank you.

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January 1, 2014
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 familyfive-year-old Martin and seven-year-old Milly as well as a garage-living stepson and an in-law-apartment-living father-in-lawhad 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 bea spectacle of travel and awesome experiencecomes through in the writing but doesn't disturb this touching, hard-won paean to mothering and parenting, living and losing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)