The obituary for Renay Corren was not your normal newspaper obit.
One of the first sentences went like this: “The bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it.”
It went on to describe Renay’s life as a card shark, pothead, reader of trashy novels, and prolific spender of every dollar that passed through her hands.
That obit went viral. It was written by her son Andy Corren, a writer in New York City.
And he has now expanded it into a memoir of his mother called “Dirtbag Queen,” which focuses on Andy’s near-feral childhood in Fayetteville, N.C., before moving on to his mother’s final days among her squabbling family in El Paso.
It is a book of love and chaos and frequent profanity.
Those of you with delicate ears should know that all of that spills over into my talk with Andy.
I think you’ll find that despite the chaos, the love part is what comes through the most.