'Renay Was Middle-Aged, Obese and Broke:' In “Dirtbag Queen”, We Meet the Hilarious Renay — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

When Andy Corren's larger-than-life mom died in 2021, the obituary he wrote about her had to match. In a thousand-word masterpiece, he reported that his mom, Renay Mandel Corren a “bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch” and “talented and gregarious grifter” had “kicked it.”

It went on announce a “very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial” that would be held “most likely at a bowling alley,” adding, “The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none whatsoever." Corren got his wish when the death notice went viral on X (formerly known as Twitter) shortly after its publication.

Now, with his forthcoming memoir Dirtbag Queen, out Jan. 14 from Grand Central Publishing, Corren is expanding on his family's colorful history with Renay at the center. It introduces readers to the rest of Renay's six kids: his brothers, affectionately nicknamed Asshole, Twin and Rabbi; his one-eyed pirate queen of a sister, Cathy Sue; and Bonus, the mysterious older brother who Andy meets later in life, after he grew up at the Green Valley School for Emotionally Disturbed and Delinquent Children.

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Below, in an exclusive excerpt from what the official description calls an “entertaining and poignant portrayal of the complex and heartfelt humanity that unites us all," we see the night the Corren clan got evicted from a residence they affectionately call "Roach House."

We evacuated Roach House in the middle of the night.

I imagine you are asking yourself some questions. For instance, “Why leave a place called Roach House? You make it sound so enchanting.”

A house named after a roach can hardly go further to hell, you properly surmise, but nobody ever tells you, until you get Corren poor, that hell is a high-rise, a multifamily residence with many levels above and below “the roach line.” We were always stabbing at that up button, desperate to change our elevator’s directions, but Correns seemed built to go one way only, each time: another level down.

Renay was always prepared for s--- to go down, and so, by extension, were we. This was our third bounce house since she lost the house on Pamalee. Renay worked longer and harder than ever at B&B, she’s gone full-time, and up and left the Sunoco behind, quite suddenly it seemed to me, taking second shift at the Qwik Mart, which was absolutely spelled Q- W- I- K, and where Renay definitely boosted bags of terrible groceries for us kids every single shift.

Renay was middle-aged, obese and broke. She had that yo-yo, sugary diabetes that she kept at bay with shots of insulin, and even though me and Twin and Asshole routinely burned piles of carcinogenic bowling pins for heat in our darkest months of Roach House winter, we did have a roof over our heads. A whole house.

We hadn’t ended up at the trailers on Cobra, which remained the lowest point on Renay’s internal dignity meter. I have a feeling that the Cobra trailers were a lot better furnished, not to mention had heat and power, than this roach-infested, damp sh---brick on Brainerd that made my mom feel superior to the poors on Cobra. She was doing her best to keep us all alive, mostly warm, and her nails done. We laughed with her all along the way. Laughed at hunger, at the mustard-and-lettuce sandwiches, at the conniving to pry snacks out of vending machines with coat hangers, at the low- stakes boosting of hot plates of food at the K&W Cafeteria. We laughed at it all.

Until the next eviction.

Subsequent to our midnight evacuation of Roach House, 22-year-old Rabbi had returned to Fayetteville Tech to get his GED and go Fayetteville legit. He was still slinging speed at titty bars, driving a cab full of hookers and parolees and flirting each day with every Fayetteville son’s seductress, the county jail.

Asshole, following in his brother’s illustrious footsteps, had at long last defeated the principals of Westover and dropped out junior year to spend more quality time with the oversized pickled egg jar and the broken cigarette vending machine at Bev’s Place on Bragg. He spent his days making a menace of himself alongside Bev’s son Dicky, and while not a total crook, Asshole was a minor functionary in a gang of world-class Fayetteville doofuses. They all loved Renay, and understandably. Our house was open and nonjudgmental, and our mother probably sold them weed.

Everybody stole from one another, got drunk and punched each other out in the parking lot, drove too fast, wrecked each other’s cars, got busted together, bailed each other out and started all over again, just as soon as they sobered up. Family.

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Me and Twin are 13 and 14, two ambitious, horny teenagers, boxing our busted Atari; bundling our besieged cat, Frisky, into a laundry hamper with one of Renay’s torn nylon stockings stretched over it so he could breathe. Move after move, we carted our secondhand clothes and stacks of Renay’s Penthouse magazines and what little furniture we had into and out of homes, setting up shop, making our way through yet another school, exploring another neighborhood, then leaving when Renay ran out of cash. We made the best of the homes that she found, the shacks that lacked heat, water or a phone. We made the best, because we had each other, and while we were often the worst, we were better than nothing at all. 

It all went to sh--- at Roach House when Rabbi got our Sansui receiver stolen from Bonnie Doone, which, again, is a neighborhood, not a girlfriend. All of Rabbi’s girlfriends back then had proper, Christian-girl disco names like Pepper, or Summer or Season. Bonnie Doone is a neighborhood on the north side of Fayetteville that has been so notorious for so long it has become synonymous with phrases like “carried out on a stretcher” and “next of kin.”

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It’s where Rabbi lived in a shack he rented from an upstanding Baptist slumlord named Brown, who was not only Rabbi’s landlord but was also a dear family friend and Rabbi’s personal attorney — a handy combination in a town like Fayetteville. The house had four walls and was affordable on a cab driver’s salary, and well situated, too, on that busiest part of the Bragg Boulevard corridor that slingshots around Fayetteville from downtown to Spring Lake to Fort Bragg. 

My brother was a very busy driver, picking up a lot of fares on Hay Street: drunk folks with suspended licenses, lost soldiers standing outside payphone boxes in a hurry to get back to base before their pass expired. Rabbi took a lot of folks to a lot of cheap dentists, and quite a few ladies seeking discreet abortions to the nearby township of Spring Lake. He also racked up a lot of tickets and suspensions, so I expect the on-demand legal services provided by Deacon Brown were an attractive inducement. 

Barely 22 years old, Rabbi was well on his way through the relentless churn of Fayetteville’s fine institutions of justice and correction, and about to go further than any of us had ever imagined.

Your honor, I rise to offer this in my brother Rabbi’s defense: it wasn’t just regular stereo equipment that was stolen from him in Bonnie Doone. It was far more sentimental than that. This was the last, remaining good stereo equipment that S---head and Renay had returned with from our family’s time in Japan, and it had sat in a place of honor in the last family house, on Pamalee. We didn’t have rich- people things like scrapbooks or family heirlooms or good memories, stuff we could reverently gather around when the cable or the water had been shut off again. 

Oh, we had a few stray things. A portable Brother sewing machine that my mother never, not one single time, figured out how to use. Two wooden screens that somehow made the journey from Japan, and that we now used to create privacy in stinky shared bedrooms. A melancholy and sincerely ugly pair of oil paintings, a mamasan and a papasan, who looked down upon us from a series of ever sh--tier living room walls, who seemed to grow more exhausted with each move.

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We had several dozen cardboard boxes of purloined B-2 unit c-rations which never made it to Vietnam. Twin, Asshole, and I — always ravenous — enjoyed tearing into those thick, greasy, green plastic cans of bitter spaghetti and devouring stale, flat soda crackers dipped into packets of oily cheese spread, which, to this day — and I have been to Paris thrice — is the best thing I have ever eaten. 

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We fought over who got the cans of pineapple cake, and Asshole always took the little four-packs of cigarettes the Army so thoughtfully provided, while I always swiped the creamer and instant coffee, because you never knew when guests might arrive. That was it, the few, paltry artifacts we had left.

Somehow Rabbi, of all people, our speed-slinging brother, managed to hold on to S---head’s deluxe Sansui stereo system, the one he bought between the Tet Offensive and the fall of Saigon, and left behind, with us, after the fall of the House of Corren. Rabbi loved that stereo. We all did. It was comforting. The wood paneling. The Akai GX- 747 reel-to-reel player. The thick silver knobs that turned a quiet, electric green with a humming, thrumming current that sent every audiophile’s heart racing. Those boxy, breathtakingly tall speakers that made the walls quake with Southern power rock. It was a serious audio system for a serious stoner, and it was Rabbi’s prized possession.

Then it got seriously stole.

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One night the Sansui disappeared into the dank guts of Bonnie Doone’s fascinating ecosystem of pawn shops and mobile home parks. However, what might be considered a lost cause to nearly the entire human race was merely a speed bump on the way to revenge for a man such as my stupidest brother — by a landslide — the foolish Rabbi of Bonnie Doone. He was inconsolable — and filled with a rage and lust for recovery.

He somehow managed to get a tip from our family friend and part-time paid informant, Detective Hicks, a hulking and likable Fayetteville cop. We knew Detective Hicks from the bowling alley, and he always kept us out of real trouble. Rabbi pried the name and address of the suspected Bonnie burglar out of Detective Hicks, and then did the stupidest thing one can do in the Doone: he shot at that burglar. Now just to be clear, Rabbi missed all three times. But he was arrested, and now we needed some bail money.

It’s just that simple.

Rabbi caught a few well-earned Class E felonies, including assault and battery, assault with a deadly weapon and felony breaking and entering. It threw our family into a familiar spiral of disarray.

My brother lost his Sansui and his damned mind, and we lost our rent money, so we had to move. Rabbi was in jail for over a month. It took every nickel Renay had to spring him, but she did it. With every financial bridge laughingly long ago burned behind her and — spoiler alert! — zero savings, Renay understandably got behind on the rent. There would be no catching up.

Like the many before us, we fell behind, because one of our own had fallen. But like the Navy SEALS, or the fabled 1982 Dolphins, who famously carried their destroyed tight end off the field before losing to the San F---ing Diego Chargers, we Correns do not leave one of our own behind in Bonnie Doone. Much as we would’ve loved to. Renay bailed Rabbi out, and now Roach House was in the wind.

Excerpted from the book Dirtbag Queen: A Memoir or My Mother. Copyright © 2025 by Andy Corren. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Dirtbag Queen: A Memoir of My Mother hits shelves Jan. 14 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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