Kelly Corrigan

In Kelly Corrigan's "Tell Me More," the author shares vignettes about her life, and imparts lessons she has learned about communication, responsibility, and empathy. In her younger years, she drank and smoked too much, was fired from several jobs, shoplifted, was suspended from school, and racked up six thousand dollars in debt. Throughout it all, her dad was her champion, assuring her that she would become a mature and productive member of society. It took a while, but Corrigan eventually show more earned a master's degree in English literature, held down a good job, married the easygoing Edward Lichty, and became the mother of two daughters, Georgia and Claire.

Fifty-year-old Kelly Corrigan is candid, hilarious, self-deprecating, and wise. Readers will relate to Corrigan, who shouts her imperfections from the rooftops. She calls herself "a fed-up, put-out sourpuss," melts down over minor mishaps, has "vigilante tendencies," failed to visit her aged grandmother as often as she should have, and screams profanities when she is upset. On the other hand, she was a good friend when her pal, Liz, suffered through debilitating cancer treatments. In addition, she devotedly took care of her father during his final days. Kelly can be a Dr. Jekyll or Mrs. Hyde, a Mother Teresa or a shrieking harridan (depending on the circumstances), but she acknowledges her failings and resolves to correct them.

The takeaways from this breezy, high-energy, and absorbing book are: We should listen more attentively and talk less; admit it when we're wrong; settle for "good enough" rather than demand perfection; know when to say "no," "yes," or nothing at all; and tell the ones we love how much they mean to us. Corrigan writes from the heart with humor, insight, wit, and pizazz. She may be a mess at times (aren't we all?), but she owns up to her shortcomings and advises us how to live with ours. When we hit bumps in the road, it is sometimes difficult to regroup. As a really smart fellow once told Kelly, "We'd really be in trouble if we gave up on change or the potential for growth." Corrigan suggests that we adopt ways of thinking and behaving that will help us feel better about ourselves, strengthen our interpersonal relationships, and enable us to navigate life's pitfalls with a semblance of grace. show less

While reading the opening pages of the first essay in this book, titled, “It’s Like This,” I settled in to what I thought would be a collection of light, memoir-ish pieces. By the concluding pages of that essay, where Corrigan is herself settling in to what she realizes is her life (“It’s like this ... this is how [life] goes"), I realized these essays were going to be far more substantive (important, even) than I’d expected.

They’re not self-help, although they do inspire me show more toward a better self. They are memoir, sometimes about friends but mostly about family (the one Corrigan grew up in and the one she is co-creating), and are riveting with specificity and reflection. They’re wry and wise and touching, at times to the point of prompting tears. I loved them.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

Kelly Corrigan is an excellent writer. Besides having a universally valuable story to tell, she's a master of metaphor, and her reading of the audiobook is stellar, complete with authentic accents, and voices for the different characters that are so convincing you completely forget that it's all being read by the same person. And there's this one part that is the hottest kissing scene I've ever read, described all from deep emotions without using sexual words. It's truly amazing. But you show more have to have the story behind you and the characters developed in order to experience it, so no fair skipping ahead. I think I might buy the paper version of the book just so I can pick it up and open it to the best parts and re-read them. show less

GLITTER AND GLUE, a memoir by Kelly Corrigan, is probably not a book I normally would have read, or even noticed. I would have dismissed it as just another "mother-daughter book." But my daughter pressed it on me, saying, "You've got to read this, Dad. It's really good!" The title reflects the roles her own parents played in the raising of Kelly and her two brothers. Her dad was the 'glitter' - the "hale-fellow-well-met" good-time Charley sort, in whose eyes Kelly could do no wrong. Her show more mother was the 'glue' - the responsible one, who made the rules, looked after the house and bills and made all the hard and important decisions.

My daughter was right. This really is an excellent book, much more than what I'd expected. And it was easy to see why she so readily identified with Corrigan's story - the early rebellion against parental rules and restrictions, the life-long problem with self-image and weight control, the Baltimore connection, the clubbing with best friends, smoking and drinking. And then, finally, the gradual realization that perhaps your parents, particularly your mother, wasn't so wrong about things after all.

Corrigan took off after college with her best friend, Tracy, to see the world, convinced that life really begins when you get out of the house. They make it all the way to Australia before they run out of funds. Too proud and stubborn to wire her folks for money, and unable to find any other work, Kelly takes a job in suburban Sydney as a nanny for two small children whose mother has died from cancer. Over the next several months with the Tanner family, she gradually begins to learn some larger truths about life as she begins to care deeply for her young charges, seven year-old Millie and four year-old Martin. And she becomes caught up in the lives of their extended and blended family.

But this doesn't happen all at once. She still goes clubbing with Tracy, cruising to meet guys. On one such outing she tells of them sharing a jumbo pack of cigarettes -

"... an incredible fifty cigarettes. Smoking is idiotic, I know. I've seen the pictures of dirty lungs, but I'm young, and we don't have cancer in our family. Anyway, I'll quit before I have kids."

Again, I thought of my daughter, that easy feeling of invulnerability that afflicts us all when we are young. And, ironically, there IS cancer in Kelly's family, and she has her own frightening experience years later.

In her spare time, Corrigan reads, making her way slowly through Willa Cather's classic MY ANTONIA, which she remembers as being a favorite of her mother's. There is a parallel here, of course -

"There's no telling how MY ANTONIA would taste to me if I had tried it years ago, in class or one summer by the pool, instead of here, a foreigner in a motherless home ... And then there's the matter of my mother, who loved it so, and how I seem to be looking for her in every passage."

Willa Cather was one of my own mother's favorite authors, and I thought of her as I read this. And of course, I thought of my daughter too, "looking for her in every passage."

Another poignant segment is when Corrigan tells of overhearing her mother tell, with perfect pitch and timing, an off-color joke to her coworkers in the realty office where she worked. Shocked at hearing this from her devoutly Catholic and usually humorless mother, she reflects -

"But now I see there's no such thing as A woman, ONE woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?"

Too true. And here's another similar passage about how we see our mothers -

"It was hard for me to imagine my mother young. She's never really been me, a girl out of college, looking at the map, wondering where to unpack her trunk and set up her JCPenney bedroom set."

Again, I thought of my own mother, who died this year, and whose college letters from over seventy-five years ago I have been reading. A real revelation, meeting your mother, young.

And another passage in which I see my daughter. In it, Corrigan is telling of her older self, a mother of two and a cancer survivor -

"... although there's nothing unusually challenging about my children, I often find myself responding to their sudden and inscrutable moods, mighty wills, and near-constant arguing by turning into a wild-eyed fishwife. Some interactions are so strangely familiar, it's as if I once starred as little orphan Annie and then, decades later, found myself cast in the revival as Miss Hannigan."

I had to laugh at this, because I still vividly remember my little girl belting out her own enthusisastic version of "Tomorrow"; and now, a young woman with a strong-willed little boy, calling her mother nearly every day and pouring out her troubles, only now realizing that sometimes indeed "It's a Hard-Knock Life."

Yes, this is a "mother-daughter" book, but it's not just a book for women. There is a lot to be learned here - of mothers, daughters, wives - and sons, husbands and fathers would do well to pay heed. GLITTER AND GLUE is a funny, moving, and yes, a very wise book. I'm grateful to my daughter for giving it to me. Now I'm handing it over to my wife, who I'm sure will see not just our daughter in it, but herself and her own mother too. It's that kind of book. I recommend it highly. show less