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Southern Exposure

Andy Corren went viral with his outrageous obituary for his mother in 2021. Now he tells the whole story in his new memoir, ‘Dirtbag Queen.’

by
Karen Iris Tucker
January 14, 2025
Andy, at right, and Renay at B&B Lanes bowling alley, circa 1984

Courtesy Andy Corren

Andy, at right, and Renay at B&B Lanes bowling alley, circa 1984

Courtesy Andy Corren

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.”

Andy Corren
Andy Corren

Patrick J. Adams

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.”

For starters, Renay called him “Ann,” privately—and sometimes it slipped in public. Corren recalled soothing her with foot rubs and copious amounts of macadamia nuts as she pursued her grueling divorce in 1978. For much of his youth, the two spent nights on her queen-size heated waterbed, reading pulpy medical thrillers and Judith Krantz romances together. Many times, those reading sessions took place at dawn after Corren and his brothers had helped Renay with her job of delivering newspapers around town. There was that endeavor, along with pot-selling, working at a bowling alley, manning a gas kiosk at Sunoco. Taken together, Renay’s gigs barely kept the family afloat financially. This necessitated that they move every year or so, frequently decamping after midnight, days before rent was due.

The memoir carefully, if a bit lewdly, constructs the buildup in that cycle of poverty: “Move after move, we carted our secondhand clothes and Renay’s Penthouse magazines … making our way through yet another school, exploring a new neighborhood, then leaving when Renay ran out of cash.”

Even so, Corren dedicates much space in the book to how enamored he was with Renay and their exclusive time together. “We were bobbing on the waterbed, scattered like buoys among the ocean of comforting mess she had amassed around her: The used paperback books and balled-up Kleenex, the brow mirrors and barbecue chips. … All of it arranged around Renay, her whole world at her fingertips. A court. A queen.”

The two remained close until she died. The obituary that Corren wrote for his mother pulled no punches, taking on her lust for life, her medical maladies, bankruptcies, her abortions. He took the timing of her death as an omen—the sign to take the leap into full-time writing to share her story. “I knew, instantly, I either needed to get on this dinghy and row like hell, or I was a fool, because she was giving me an opportunity,” he told me. “One of my brothers joked, ‘She finally did something right.’”

It remains something of an oddity that this middle-class Jewish woman from Miami Beach came to disavow the balabusta tendencies of her own mother, instead preferring to spend her time fishing, bowling, and dealing cards until sunrise with Crown Royal and fellow travelers whom she barely knew. Corren could only speculate about the reasons: “Her marriage was a wreck. We were poor. I don’t think she had a lot of time or patience to do the things other people were doing. She was never built that way.”

It didn’t help that Renay had to leave the University of Miami only a year and a half in, after becoming pregnant with her first son. Later in her marriage, she was subject to a fair amount of her husband’s violent emotional outbursts and flying plates, scenes her kids bore witness to before Renay ultimately kicked him out. At the time of her divorce, she was dealing with the first of two rounds of breast cancer, and also battled diabetes.

Although Fayetteville has a 100-year-old synagogue, Temple Beth Israel, Corren says the family never partook. “Renay wore her Judaism not just proudly but very loudly, and she associated with Fayetteville Jews. But they were all doing much better than her, financially. We were just too poor for that stuff, you know? We were out trying to steal turkey and ham from the commissary,” he joked.

An undated photo of Renay Corren
An undated photo of Renay Corren

Courtesy Andy Corren

Rabbi Dov Goldberg, who has led the Conservative temple since 2019, confirmed that old-timers in the congregation don’t seem to recall the Correns. “I remember when her obituary came out, and others here saw it, too,” he told me. “She really sounded like a character. If you met her, you know, you knew you met her.” He theorized that she probably didn’t fit the mold for the typical congregant in the ’70s, even if Beth Israel was traditionally rather welcoming. “Most of the folks here, especially the women, they weren’t in a bowling league,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s not what they did. Even if they weren’t particularly religious, they probably were members of the Sisterhood, and you know, she sounds like she was not a Sisterhood lady. It just wasn’t her personality.”

Renay may have also chafed at the fact that Beth Israel was historically an Orthodox synagogue. It only officially became a Conservative congregation and rewrote its laws to give women more rights in religious participation in 1972, said Shira Muroff, director of programs at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. “Maybe a family headed by his mom could have been trying to figure out how you fit in in a congregation that’s only starting to become egalitarian,” she told me.

Corren wonders what the Jewish community in Fayetteville thought of him, and his brothers, who were in and out of various petty crimes to supplement the family income. “They knew us as Jews,” he said. “It wasn’t like a shameful secret, but they lived on the opposite spectrum, financially, spiritually.”

Conversely, he also describes in his memoir the conundrum of his brothers embodying the attributes of their friends in the larger community, while still being relegated by an invisible force field to otherness: “All my brothers shot shit: hoops, deer, even their friends once or twice. … Yet despite all that, we were still the outsiders, still those Jews from that shit house down the street.”

If Corren’s brothers, as he says, fit the “redneck” stereotype, he was always the opposite, filling his days with amassing an immaculate TV Guide collection, dreaming about an acting career and also very tentatively romancing boys in the various neighborhoods he called home over time. Corren didn’t officially tell Renay he was gay until he was 22 and had moved to New York City. Initially devastated, she soon made peace with it, meeting all his boyfriends over the holidays and other events.

Corren was shocked she didn’t sense his sexuality years before but he has come to understand it. “It was a different era where we almost had to put on sepia goggles,” he said. “Nobody wanted a gay kid back then. Being a gay person in the South was dangerous.”

Though he doesn’t share it in the book, Corren’s favorite memory of Renay as an adult was when he had amassed some wealth and success as a talent agent and took her out to eat at a Jewish deli in Arizona. He had a client who was shooting in Scottsdale, and had flown Renay in from El Paso, Texas, where she had lived with one of his brothers.

Corren remembers: “I was like, ‘order whatever you want.’ And she goes, ‘I’m going to get one of everything.’ And that’s what we did, because, of course, El Paso is a Jewish food desert. We had this giant deli table and we just filled it with things. What she taught me in that meal was beautiful and it has stayed with me for the rest of my life.”

Karen Iris Tucker is a freelance journalist who writes primarily about health, genetics, and cultural politics. Find her work at kareniristucker.com and follow her on Twitter at @kareniristucker.