Glitter and Glue

Referring to her 2014 memoir Glitter and Glue, Kelly Corrigan has noted, “It’s about a key of all emotions: acceptance.” When Corrigan was a headstrong teenager, her mother sized up their family with the words, “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” Glitter appealed more to the young Corrigan, and she admired her father’s unflappable optimism and unflagging enthusiasm. But when Corrigan stumbles into the role of surrogate mother for the children of recently widowed John Tanner, she starts to accept the value of the unglamorous “glue” required to hold a family together. She writes, “It didn’t happen all at once. […] But I know when it started: twenty years ago, in the home of Ellen Tanner, a woman I never met.”

Before revisiting her past with the grieving Tanners, and the insights they occasioned about her own mother, Corrigan makes use of a prologue to establish her current circumstances. She is married, and has two daughters of her own. At age 36, she fought breast cancer and won. But two years later, her doctor recommends removing her ovaries because of suspicious growths. This latest news triggers a newfound desire to talk with her mother, Mary. While Corrigan has always felt closer to her free-spirited father, his unfailing good cheer is not the right antidote for her sudden anxiety. She wants her mother’s realistic, no-nonsense guidance, and soon enough, Mary is on a plane to San Francisco to help her daughter through the surgery.

As a child growing up in 1970s Philadelphia, Corrigan adored her father George, a breezy salesman and one-time lacrosse star. As for her stern, Catholic mother, she was too busy for fun, and too practical to indulge frivolities. Corrigan remembers the Christmas she asked for magenta moon boots, but her mother vetoed them in favor of a copy of the New Testament. Not one for tender words or warm hugs, Mary seemingly experienced motherhood more as a job than a joy. Her interest in her children mainly centered on enforcing rules and disciplining transgressions. To wit, when the teenaged Kelly was caught shoplifting, her mother slapped her with such force she drew blood. Corrigan writes that she “left childhood” engaged in an “adversarial but functional” relationship with her mother.



The foregoing childhood details emerge in piecemeal fashion throughout the memoir’s centerpiece: an extended recollection of the author’s experiences living in Australia with the Tanner family. As a recent college graduate in 1992, Corrigan’s motto is “Things happen when you leave the house.” She wants to become an “Interesting Person,” and that calls for a backpacking trip with her friend Tracy through South Asia and Australia. Fun-loving George cheers the idea, but nay-saying Mary advises her daughter to get a job and health insurance instead. The glitter view prevails, and Corrigan sets out on her odyssey. But when their funds bottom out in Australia, the women go job hunting. Corrigan takes a position as a nanny for the Tanner children, Martin, age five, and his eight-year-old sister, Milly. After crossing the globe to “leave the house,” Corrigan settles into domestic life in the suburbs of Sydney.

As a flight attendant, John Tanner spends much of his time away from home. His wife, Ellen, died some six months ago due to breast cancer. With little preparation, and no introduction to her young charges, Corrigan walks into a household unravelling from months of grief-born neglect. Martin, buoyant and eager for a nurturing presence, asks the name of her mother (his habit with everyone he meets), and quickly accepts her. Milly, however, deeply affected by her mother’s death, rejects Corrigan’s overtures. Ellen’s father, Pops, also lives in the house, shuffling about doing laundry and quickly retreating to his room. The fifth family member is Evan, Ellen’s older son from a previous marriage.

Her first day on the job, having delivered the children to school, Corrigan is uncertain how to proceed. John Tanner, distant and preoccupied, hasn’t given her much direction. But in short order, and much to her surprise, her mother’s words begin to surface in her mind, almost as if Mary Corrigan herself were standing beside her, murmuring advice. At dinner, the children are unruly and refuse to eat the sandwiches John has prepared. He quickly capitulates to their complaints and offers ice-cream, eliciting Mary’s judgement: “Someone needs a little backbone, my mother whispers.” And so it goes. As Corrigan embarks on this new odyssey into the unfamiliar territory of motherhood, when she hits a snag, her mother’s counsel, once unwelcome, comes to her rescue. From caring for sick children to cutting meat properly, Corrigan realizes her sure-footed mother has marked the way for her.



As the weeks pass, Corrigan slowly restores order to the Tanners’ daily lives. Martin’s cravings for small, maternal attentions are easy to satisfy. With Evan, who is just a few years her junior, Corrigan learns to play chess and enjoys an innocent flirtation. But Milly remains aloof. As Corrigan tries to win her affections, she grows increasingly invested in the child’s emotional well-being. When she glimpses Milly feeling truly happy during dance class, Corrigan herself registers the child’s joy. She suddenly understands that her own mother, who seemed dispassionate, may have always been exhausted not “because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.”

When Corrigan leaves after five months with the Tanners, she hasn’t replaced their lost mother, but she has provided the “glue” they needed when they were coming undone. Years later, after becoming a mother herself and fearing her cancer could undo her own family, she gratefully calls upon her mother again. She still admires her father’s “Life Eater” attitude, but now regards her mother’s solid competence as indispensable to navigating the adventures of domestic life. Summing up her mother and her memoir, Corrigan says, “She’s […] not showy, affectionate. She wouldn’t sit still if I tried to tell her, ‘You’re wonderful.’ So I snuck her into this 300-page love letter in front of everyone.”