I Was Writing for the Legions: A Guest Post by Andy Corren
A raucous good read commemorating the life of a mother who contained multitudes. At times heartfelt, hilarious and full of genuine human emotion, this is a book that hits deep. Read on for Andy Corren’s exclusive guest post on writing Dirtbag Queen.
Hardcover $30.00
Dirtbag Queen
Dirtbag Queen
By Andy Corren
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
In this “utterly unhinged, hilarious” memoir, a son pays tribute to his larger than life ‘zaftig good time gal’ mother and his unusual childhood (Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author).
In this “utterly unhinged, hilarious” memoir, a son pays tribute to his larger than life ‘zaftig good time gal’ mother and his unusual childhood (Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author).
After more than 50 years of telling myself I couldn’t and wondering if I even should—I finally wrote a danged book. All it took was a very dead mother to get us here.
Wait. Let me go back.
I didn’t kill my mother Renay Mandel Corren. But you did make her famous.
In December of 2021, when we were all stuck inside, fighting over Tiger Kings and surfing the latest Covid waves, struggling to TikTok our gardens and bread bakes and anxiety dances (remember??), my mother Renay Mandel Corren lay dying in an El Paso hospital. At 84 years of age, after a lifetime lived larger and farther beyond her wildest checkbooks, several lifetimes living by her own code—the old red mare was finally kicking it.
Mommy was dying.
Then she died and I hit publish on Renay’s ‘obituary,’ a pithy encomium which was really more of a short story, than an obituary. Anyway, that damned ‘obituary’ cost me thousands and thousands of dollars—they charge by the word!—and it went out to the world. I regret nothing. Renay was a book, and books were our love language. Renay deserved a book-length obituary!
All heck broke loose immediately. You read the heck out of my mother’s obituary. You read it and you shared it. You read it in Fayetteville, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Miami, El Paso, Jerusalem, London, Sydney, Tokyo, and Tennessee. Y’all read that thing! My mother’s death, and my celebration of the wild, lascivious, ribald life of a laughingly broke gambler with expensive fingernails from North Carolina went very viral. Her mistakes. Her bounced checks. Her boyfriend Larry King. The six kids, some of whom she even got to know. All of it was out in the open. It belonged to you. You cried, laughed, re-shared, and, along with me: you grieved.
As these things happen, a few weeks after my viral infamy, I got a book agent. Accordingly, I began my long-delayed, much-desired new career as a financially struggling book author, and then, just a few months after that: I got a book deal to write Dirtbag Queen. Now it is in your hands! It has been a long, strange, magnificent journey for me, Renay’s youngest son, the catty gay one who left NC for New York and rarely looked back. Because she was my mother, and because I was tasked with her lifetime of care and story, you are about to read the only book that could possibly have been written about the only woman like Renay to have ever, possibly lived.
I wrote this book thinking of you. Every day I went to work on Dirtbag Queen I knew I was writing for the legions who had fallen in love with Renay, with her courage, her craftiness, her benevolent chicanery. I wrote Dirtbag Queen knowing that my first book—the one I had always dreamed of writing—had to tell the true story of Renay, her family…and me. And so I did.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading Dirtbag Queen. I dearly hope you enjoy.
