Glitter and Glue

A defining experience of Kelly Corrigan’s life was the year she spent in Australia, aged 24, looking after the five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter of a newly-widowed father whose wife died of cancer.

But it’s only some years later, when Kelly, with children of her own, gets cancer that her time with the Tanner family comes back into sharp focus.

Yet this memoir is not about getting cancer, or the fear of dying. It’s about the dynamics of Corrigan’s relationship with her mother. As she says, it takes “ten years, two children and a tumour” before she comes round.

Which all sounds rather depressing. Actually, the book is sometimes downright funny. I laughed out loud several times (somewhat embarrassing in a public place) but also had to pause a couple of times to shed a tear. To my surprise, (this kind of memoir is not to my usual taste) I read the book in one sitting.

As far as Corrigan was concerned, she had relegated her mother to the bottom drawer of her new adult life. But suddenly, faced with having to deal with two children who recently lost their mother, Kelly finds that it’s her mother’s voice she keeps hearing, prompting and guiding her.

Each new situation she is confronted with causes her to re-evaluate their relationship. It was her mother who had always said “no no no”, and “eat your beans” and “stop doing that right this minute” while her father tickled her, bought her presents and hugged her a lot. And she frequently commented: “Your father’s the glitter of this family; I’m the glue.”

Thanks to journals that Corrigan kept, the story is rich with pleasing day-to-day minutiae made more complex and exciting by the presence of an attractive older step-son, who lives in the annexed, and also the children’s maternal grandfather.

The book highlights how there are aspects of our mothers that we never discover. Corrigan has no sense of her mother beyond what she sees in front of her. Then one day she goes to her mother’s workplace, and discovers that her mother is considered very funny, the “life of the office”, something that amazes her. Later, when she has her own children, Kelly confides to her mother that Claire, her younger daughter, has accused her of loving the older daughter more than her.

“What am I supposed to do about that?” Kelly asks her mother. Her plain-spoken mother’s response is pragmatic. “You do your damnedest to keep things even-Steven,” she says.

What makes this compelling reading is that we recognise our own family dynamics, and ourselves. The fragility of the motherless children heightens Corrigan’s appreciation of her mother.

If Corrigan weren’t a writer, she’d make a great psychologist. Glitter and Glue may not have the lyrical sweep of Pico Ayer’s homage to his father in his biography of Graham Greene, The Man Within my Head, but it is an affecting and insightful account and well worth the read.