Glitter and Glue: A Memoir
Kelly Corrigan
Category: Nonfiction:
Memoir; Parenting & Families
Synopsis: Corrigan
recalls the summer she spent as a nanny to a family in Australia where she
learned to appreciate her mother.
Date finished: 14
May 2014
Rating: ***
Comments:
I know I read Corrigan’s previous memoir, The Middle Place
when it came out, though I don’t remember it at all. And unfortunately, I think
this subsequent memoir will follow the same fate. Corrigan is not a bad writer,
and she sometimes can be quite insightful, but there just wasn’t enough here to
stick with me. It was a nice, quick read, but it’s kind of like eating a
Hostess cupcake. Yummy, but you really should have had a turkey sandwich
instead.
I can appreciate Corrigan’s fraught relationship with her
mother. And it’s a safe topic; everyone has a mother, and most women have
difficult moments (or years) with her. But I found the archetypes of the
steady, practical mother and the seat-of-her-pants daughter rather boring. I
enjoyed the innumerable mom phrases (though the italics got annoying after a
while). And I could appreciate the maternal insight Corrigan has now that she
couldn’t imagine having while she was a nanny. But, I don’t know, it just
didn’t impress me. The whole book felt kind of sad. Corrigan doesn’t seem like
a particularly happy person, her mother doesn’t seem like a particularly loving
person, and the family Corrigan nannies for are such a fleeting part of her
life, there is no conclusion to be reached.
I’ve heard a lot of buzz surrounding this book, and I
allowed myself to get caught up in it. I used to read nothing but memoirs, and
now that I find myself reading more widely, I miss memoirs. But I’m finding
most of them just don’t hold a candle to some of the other great nonfiction on
my shelves. Memoirs like this are becoming my equivalent of guilty beach reads.
Would you recommend
this to a friend?
Eh. Nah.
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