When Renay Mandel Corren died in 2021, her obituary went viral—not because she was a celebrity or someone whose death seemed remarkable, but because the obituary itself, written for the Fayetteville Observer by her son Andy Corren, was not the kind of gentle commemoration readers expect from such things. Describing his mother as “a plus-sized Jewish lady redneck” who was really good at “pier fishing, rolling joints, and buying dirty magazines,” Corren recounted her life—real and imagined—in colorful terms, even concluding, “There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in.” Corren picks up where that obituary left off in his new memoir, “Dirtbag Queen: A Memoir of My Mother.” The book begins not with a wise-cracking, saucy ode to his mother, as you might assume given the tenor of his obit, but with a rather vulnerable, tender flashback from the late 1970s in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when Corren was an anxious 9-year-old watching his newfound love, singer Donny Osmond, on TV. Three of his four brothers, sister, and mother were also crowded around the set in their ratty living room, enjoying the chocolate babka his grandmother Nana Minna had baked. Minna and her husband, Joe, had driven in from Miami Beach to visit for the High Holidays. On that night, Corren recalls spying his red-headed mom, “as she delicately picked crumbs from her décolletage with her long nails, sucking at them like prized oysters.” Such mirth-tinged memories Corren shares in “Dirtbag Queen” are painfully undercut by the realities of his growing up in an impoverished Jewish family in the South. “We were the poorest of the poor,” Corren told me when he sat down to talk about the book one rainy day in a midtown Manhattan office. Corren, 55, hair buzzed on the sides and dressed in all black, has a booming showman’s voice that ricocheted off the beige walls. He is, after all, a show business casualty, a former stand-up performer and talent manager turned full-time writer. Yet, his tenor grew soft and circumspect when discussing the contours of growing up with a single parent who gravitated to late-night games of cribbage with assorted drifters who camped out in their family home on the wrong side of town. “I didn’t particularly think of our relationship as maternal,” Corren told me. “If anything, it was more of a caretaker arrangement that she was very comfortable with.” ...

Continue reading →︎