Book Review: Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan

Glitter and Glue:  A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan

Glitter and Glue has been on my Goodreads for a while now and I was excited when my hold came in at the library.  I really enjoyed this memoir and hope that you may too.

Summary from Goodreads:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the author of The Middle Place comes a new memoir that examines the bond—sometimes nourishing, sometimes exasperating, occasionally divine—between mothers and daughters.
 
When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom—with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism—would be nothing more than background chatter for the rest of Kelly’s life, which she was carefully orienting toward adventure. After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting.

But it didn’t turn out the way she pictured it. In a matter of months, her savings shot, she had a choice: get a job or go home. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. They chatted for an hour, discussed timing and pay, and a week later, Kelly moved in. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, 10,000 miles from the house where she was raised, her mother’s voice was suddenly everywhere, nudging and advising, cautioning and directing, escorting her through a terrain as foreign as any she had ever trekked. Every day she spent with the Tanner kids was a day spent reconsidering her relationship with her mother, turning it over in her hands like a shell, straining to hear whatever messages might be trapped in its spiral.

This is a book about the difference between travel and life experience, stepping out and stepping up, fathers and mothers. But mostly it’s about who you admire and why, and how that changes over time. 

Goodreads summed this book up perfectly.  Throughout the book, I kept thinking about my relationship with my own mother and how it has grown and changed dramatically since I was a child to a teenager and now as an adult with my own children.  As Kelly shared her experiences as a nanny in Australia, reminiscing on what her mother would say in each situation, I imagined my mother as well.  My only complaint was that I wished to hear more of Kelly Corrigan's story as a mother herself.  I loved Part One (her as a nanny in Australia), but felt Part Two was too short and I wanted to know more about her adult life and relationship with her mother when she returned home, married, and had her own children.

Glitter and Glue is one of the books that reminds me how important my relationship is with my mother.  For that I will be forever grateful Kelly Corrigan shared her story.  Happy Thanksgiving!