{"id":3420,"date":"2014-02-10T15:17:27","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T20:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=3420"},"modified":"2014-02-10T15:17:27","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T20:17:27","slug":"glitter-glue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/glitter-glue\/","title":{"rendered":"Glitter and Glue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"201402-omag-obc-14-284xfall\"I<\/span> was sitting at my kitchen table answering email last Monday when a note from Kelly Corrigan popped into my inbox.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know Kelly personally, but somewhere along the way I must have signed up to be on her mailing list.<\/p>\n

The note was casual, hastily typed, without so much as a capital letter \u2013 the kind of quickie email I\u2019d expect to get from a close friend:<\/p>\n

22 years ago i started writing a book about a family i lived with in australia and how that radically upended many opinions i held of my mother.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Below, there was a link to a reading<\/strong><\/a> Kelly had done the week before, in a friend\u2019s living room in California — an essay that serves (quite brilliantly) as a trailer to her new book, Glitter and Glue<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

And so it happened that I was one of the first 100 or so people last Monday to click over to YouTube<\/strong><\/a> and watch Kelly talk about how her goal coming out of college was to become Interesting<\/em>, with a capital \u201cI<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Convinced that \u201cthings happen when you leave the house,\u201d Kelly sets off with her college roommate to travel around the world. \u00a0But it’s not long before she runs out of money, her dream of being a hippie explorer derailed by lack of funds by the time she hits Australia. \u00a0Instead of trekking in Tasmania, she winds up caring for two newly motherless children in a suburb north of Sydney.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a coming-of-age story with pictures, condensed into five minutes, and it makes for great video. I was still wiping away tears as I shared the link on Facebook.\u00a0 And then, without really thinking about it, I sent Kelly an email in return.\u00a0 \u201cLove the video,\u201d I wrote. \u201cAnd we share some territory.\u201d<\/p>\n

A reply flew back within a minute: \u201cOf course I know you!\u201d\u00a0 Two days later, two books arrived from her publisher.\u00a0 One for me to read and keep, and another for me to give away to one of you.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the amazing thing.\u00a0 As I sat down on my sofa and began to read Glitter and Glue<\/strong><\/a>, it actually did feel as if I were settling in for a good long talk with my best friend.<\/p>\n

Such is the magic of Kelly Corrigan.\u00a0 The spell she casts \u2013 an irresistible\u00a0 mix of vulnerability, heart, humor, bad-girl charm, racy language, and hard-won wisdom \u2013 draws you in close and holds you tight.\u00a0 Her words weave an invisible inner circle, and there\u2019s no place you\u2019d rather be than right at the center of it with her, sharing a second cup of coffee, leaning in close so you won\u2019t miss a word, getting down to the heart of the stuff that really matters.<\/p>\n

S<\/span>o, I should warn you now: You will not read the first pages of Glitter and Glue<\/strong><\/a> and then set it down to go off and tend to other things.\u00a0 That would be like cutting off your best friend while she\u2019s in the middle of telling you the most compelling story any of us have to share:\u00a0 the story of how we become who we are.<\/p>\n

Glitter and Glue<\/strong><\/a> is on one level a self-deprecating, poignant tale of an impulsive, self-absorbed young woman who drinks too much, smokes too much, lies a little, kisses a gazillion boys, and fancies herself a carefree rebel \u2013 only to find herself broke, far from home, and forced to come face to face with herself and the hard truths of real life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not what I left home for,\u201d Kelly whines, feeling sorry for herself on her first day on the job, \u201cI\u2019m a nanny, a fucking nanny.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as she soon discovers, she is also something more:\u00a0 she is her mother\u2019s daughter.\u00a0 Half-way around the world from the home she couldn\u2019t wait to escape, she has no choice but to step up to the plate in this somber household still reeling from tragedy.\u00a0 There is no hope whatsoever of filling the shoes of the lovely young woman who died too soon.\u00a0 But as she packs lunches and braids hair and dispenses hugs and kisses away tears, Kelly begins to realize she does know what to do.\u00a0 And that she\u2019s not all alone after all.<\/p>\n

On the contrary.\u00a0 She hears her own mother\u2019s voice everywhere \u2013 nudging and advising, cautioning and directing, guiding her through this unknown landscape called raising children — territory \u00a0that proves to be as challenging and rich and rewarding as any trek through a foreign land.<\/p>\n

Day by day, the brash young woman who defines herself with words like \u201cIntrepid,\u201d is transformed by the humble work of showing up and doing what needs to be done for a family numb with grief.\u00a0 Her heart opens and softens. She falls in love with exuberant five-year-old Martin and his more reserved and resistant big sister Millie and, in different way, with the reclusive, wounded half-brother who lives alone in the garage.\u00a0 She wonders about the pretty young woman in the photographs who didn\u2019t live to see her children grow up.\u00a0 It occurs to her she\u2019s growing \u201cless smitten with world travelers and their ripping yarns, and more awed by people who have thrown themselves into the one gig that really matters: parenthood.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she finds herself thinking of her own mother in a whole new light.<\/p>\n

For the first time, it dawns on Kelly that things happen inside<\/i> the house, too — hard things that require more strength and resilience and courage than bungee jumping off bridges or deep sea diving in caves.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time,\u201d Kelly muses,\u00a0 \u201cwasn\u2019t because she was doing so much, but because she was feeling so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

A<\/span>nd this is what Glitter and Glue<\/strong><\/a> is really about.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the birth of empathy. \u00a0It\u2019s about what it means to have a mother and what it means to be one and how it feels to lose one.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the difference between skimming along like a tourist on the surface of your own life and digging in deep.\u00a0 It\u2019s about grief and loss and growing up, and the realization that our main job here on earth isn\u2019t to change or turn away from the people we love but to learn to do a better job of seeing them as they are and loving them as best we can for as long as they are here. It\u2019s about the mysterious, ineffable bond between mothers and daughters and how that bond is transformed by time and experience and compassion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had asked me, after I graduated from college, whose voice I would hear in my head for the rest of my life,\u201d Kelly writes in the prologue, \u201cI\u2019d have said some combination of my dad\u2019s and my roommate Tracy\u2019s and Jackson Browne\u2019s.\u00a0 I would have continued with ten or twenty or two hundred others before I got to my mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it is Mary Corrigan, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane, with her inviolable rules and her proud stoicism and her serious approach to the serious work of motherhood, whose no-nonsense voice harmonizes with her daughter\u2019s more exuberant one on every page of this funny, tender, and ultimately very moving book.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour father\u2019s the glitter and I\u2019m the glue,\u201d Kelly\u2019s mom told her when she was in high school, by way of explaining the family dynamic.\u00a0 He was the star of the show; she, resigned to forever remain his less compelling, less interesting understudy.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for us, Kelly Corrigan draws her complex, demanding, passionately devoted mother out to join her on center stage in Glitter and Glue<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 And then she illuminates her for all time in the golden glow of love. \u00a0In the process, she reminds us — as if we could ever really forget — that the great adventure isn\u2019t the one we have to cross an ocean to find. \u00a0It\u2019s the one we\u2019re living right here, right now, in the midst of the people who know us best and love us anyway.<\/p>\n

\n

I have one copy of Glitter and Glue to give away!<\/span><\/h3>\n

To enter to win, you must be subscribed to my blog<\/strong>. \u00a0Then, leave a comment<\/strong> below. \u00a0I’d love to know, when you hear your own mother’s voice in your head, what is she saying? Of course, you can also just say, “Count me in!”<\/p>\n

I’ll draw one winner<\/strong> at random after entries close at midnight on Tuesday Feb. 18.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Don’t want to wait? \u00a0<\/strong>You can order Kelly’s book now by clicking here<\/a>. <\/strong>(I put the small commission I receive from this affiliate link toward buying more books to share here.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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