Cathy Glass (author)
Encyclopedia
Cathy Glass is a British author
, freelance
writer and foster care
r.
Her work is strongly identified with both the True Life Stories
and Inspirational Memoirs
genres. Glass has also written a parenting
guide to bringing up children, Happy Kids, and a novel
, The Girl in the Mirror, based on a true story.
Glass has worked as a foster career for more than 20 years, during which time she has fostered more than 50 children. Her fostering memoirs
tell the stories of some of the children who came in to her care, many of whom had suffered abuse
.
The first title, Damaged, was number one in the Sunday Times bestseller
s charts in hardback and paperback
. Her next two titles, Hidden and Cut, have also reached the non-fiction bestseller charts in The Times.
The name "Cathy Glass" is a pseudonym
. The author writes under a nom de plume due to the sensitive nature of her source material. The names of the children she writes about are likewise altered.
The author is represented by literary agent Andrew Lownie and published by HarperCollins
.
but left to start a family. The author decided to foster a child after trying unsuccessfully for a baby with then husband John; she had seen an advert in her local paper seeking a foster home for a girl named Mary and applied.
Glass and her husband were assessed as foster carers - a process that now takes about a year - but they discovered Mary had been found another foster home.
Instead, they fostered a 15-year-old boy called Jack, who had been removed from his home after his stepfather broke his nose. The couple looked after Jack while his father, who was at the time living in a bedsit, found a suitable flat.
Three months into his stay, Cathy discovered she was pregnant with her son Adrian. Despite having a baby, Glass continued to foster, taking on Dawn, a shy and polite 13-year-old who Cathy came to treat as a daughter.
Dawn proved much harder to parent due to her background and in the end had to move to a residential home with professional therapeutic help. Over the last 23 years, Glass has fostered over 50 children aged three to 16, including several like Dawn who, as a result of past experience, had behavioural issues.
Because of the challenging behaviour and special needs of many of these children Glass usually only takes one child at a time. Some have stayed for a few nights or weeks while others for a year or two.
She went on to have another child of her own, Paula, now in her late teens, and also adopted Lucy, now in her early 20s, following a long-term foster placement. In an interview with the Daily Mail
, written by Kate Hilpern and published in February 2009, Glass listed some of the abusive backgrounds the children she has cared for have come from.
At the extreme end, these include being forced into prostitution
and having to work in a sweatshop
. Many of the foster children had been physically or sexually abused and a large number had come into care as a result of severe neglect
.
In 2010, Glass released Happy Kids: The secret to raising well-behaved, contented children - based on her own child-rearing experiences.
It introduces the reader to Glass's own 3 Rs technique: Request, Repeat, Reassure.
and commercial writing. Before the release of Damaged she had written on health and social issues for The Guardian
and the Evening Standard
.
She is also a published fiction
writer, with poems and short stories
in a number of commercial magazines.
Glass's first book, Damaged was released by HarperCollins in 2007. It focuses on the relationship between Glass and Jodie, an abused child. Jodie had been at the centre of a paedophile ring before being brought into foster care. A year later, in March 2008, Glass followed up with Hidden.
Glass's third book, Cut, released in February 2009, told the story of Dawn, the second child Glass fostered.
The Saddest Girl in the World was released in October 2009, and like the three previous books, told the real life story of one of Glass's foster children. The book centres on Donna, a 10-year-old who was seriously, physically and mentally abused by her alcoholic mother.
Glass has described writing as a sort of therapy: “… certainly telling the children's stories helped me to come to terms with what the children had been through.”
Glass's next book was a non-fiction parenting manual - Happy Kids, published in 2010.
In April 2010, the author released her first novel, The Girl in the Mirror. Based on a true story, the novel centres on Mandy, a woman in her 20s who sets out to rediscover her past after buried childhood memories start to surface.
Her latest memoirs: I Miss Mummy on a four-year-old girl who was placed into temporary care with Glass and could not understand why she had to leave her grandparents- who were judged by social services to be too old to look after her- then was expected to be sent to her father despite the grandparents' vehement objections; Mummy Told Me Not To Tell, about a boy, "Reece", who had genetic disabilities and was neglected, becoming so disturbed he bit strangers and was permanently excluded from two schools by age seven; and My Dad's A Policeman, about a bullied girl whose single mother was unable to care for her due to her alcohol problems and who had never known a father- but lied to school bullies that he was a policeman in the hope of making them go away- were published in 2010 and 2011.
"Happy Adults"- a self-help guide which will be Glass's first work not specifically dealing with children- will be published later this year.
, Norwegian
, Polish
, Portuguese
, Russian
and Swedish
.
As her books deals with harrowing subjects, Glass has been placed by some critics within the Misery Literature
genre. In a 2007 article on Misery Lit, Daily Telegraph writer Ed West cited Glass's Damaged as being among “the most disturbing recent examples of the genre.”. Despite the assessment of Misery Lit by Peter Saxton, biography buyer for Waterstone's, that books in the genre appeal to readers because "Misery, in whatever form, sells, and probably always will.", it has been noted by Guardian journalist Esther Addley that Glass's work offers "a certain amount of hope". In an interview with the Daily Mail
in February 2009, Glass said that she had received "thousands" of letters and emails from readers who had either related to her novel or had been inspired to foster children themselves.
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, freelance
Freelancer
A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...
writer and foster care
Foster care
Foster care is the term used for a system in which a minor who has been made a ward is placed in the private home of a state certified caregiver referred to as a "foster parent"....
r.
Her work is strongly identified with both the True Life Stories
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
and Inspirational Memoirs
Inspirational fiction
Inspirational fiction is a term that refers to a sub-category within "inspirational literature," or "inspirational writing," used in various ways in the United States and other nations...
genres. Glass has also written a parenting
Parenting
Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood...
guide to bringing up children, Happy Kids, and a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, The Girl in the Mirror, based on a true story.
Glass has worked as a foster career for more than 20 years, during which time she has fostered more than 50 children. Her fostering memoirs
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
tell the stories of some of the children who came in to her care, many of whom had suffered abuse
Child abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
.
The first title, Damaged, was number one in the Sunday Times bestseller
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...
s charts in hardback and paperback
Paperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...
. Her next two titles, Hidden and Cut, have also reached the non-fiction bestseller charts in The Times.
The name "Cathy Glass" is a pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
. The author writes under a nom de plume due to the sensitive nature of her source material. The names of the children she writes about are likewise altered.
The author is represented by literary agent Andrew Lownie and published by HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
.
Early life and fostering
Glass used to work for the Civil ServiceCivil service
The term civil service has two distinct meanings:* A branch of governmental service in which individuals are employed on the basis of professional merit as proven by competitive examinations....
but left to start a family. The author decided to foster a child after trying unsuccessfully for a baby with then husband John; she had seen an advert in her local paper seeking a foster home for a girl named Mary and applied.
Glass and her husband were assessed as foster carers - a process that now takes about a year - but they discovered Mary had been found another foster home.
Instead, they fostered a 15-year-old boy called Jack, who had been removed from his home after his stepfather broke his nose. The couple looked after Jack while his father, who was at the time living in a bedsit, found a suitable flat.
Three months into his stay, Cathy discovered she was pregnant with her son Adrian. Despite having a baby, Glass continued to foster, taking on Dawn, a shy and polite 13-year-old who Cathy came to treat as a daughter.
Dawn proved much harder to parent due to her background and in the end had to move to a residential home with professional therapeutic help. Over the last 23 years, Glass has fostered over 50 children aged three to 16, including several like Dawn who, as a result of past experience, had behavioural issues.
Because of the challenging behaviour and special needs of many of these children Glass usually only takes one child at a time. Some have stayed for a few nights or weeks while others for a year or two.
She went on to have another child of her own, Paula, now in her late teens, and also adopted Lucy, now in her early 20s, following a long-term foster placement. In an interview with the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
, written by Kate Hilpern and published in February 2009, Glass listed some of the abusive backgrounds the children she has cared for have come from.
At the extreme end, these include being forced into prostitution
Prostitution
Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...
and having to work in a sweatshop
Sweatshop
Sweatshop is a negatively connoted term for any working environment considered to be unacceptably difficult or dangerous. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for very low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage. Child labour laws may be violated. Sweatshops may have...
. Many of the foster children had been physically or sexually abused and a large number had come into care as a result of severe neglect
Neglect
Neglect is a passive form of abuse in which a perpetrator is responsible to provide care for a victim who is unable to care for himself or herself, but fails to provide adequate care....
.
Fostering and parenting expertise
As a foster carer, Glass receives ongoing foster training and because of her experience she is asked to take on some of the more challenging children in the system.In 2010, Glass released Happy Kids: The secret to raising well-behaved, contented children - based on her own child-rearing experiences.
It introduces the reader to Glass's own 3 Rs technique: Request, Repeat, Reassure.
Writing career
Glass combines fostering with occasional freelance journalismJournalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
and commercial writing. Before the release of Damaged she had written on health and social issues for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and the Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
.
She is also a published fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
writer, with poems and short stories
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
in a number of commercial magazines.
Glass's first book, Damaged was released by HarperCollins in 2007. It focuses on the relationship between Glass and Jodie, an abused child. Jodie had been at the centre of a paedophile ring before being brought into foster care. A year later, in March 2008, Glass followed up with Hidden.
Glass's third book, Cut, released in February 2009, told the story of Dawn, the second child Glass fostered.
The Saddest Girl in the World was released in October 2009, and like the three previous books, told the real life story of one of Glass's foster children. The book centres on Donna, a 10-year-old who was seriously, physically and mentally abused by her alcoholic mother.
Glass has described writing as a sort of therapy: “… certainly telling the children's stories helped me to come to terms with what the children had been through.”
Glass's next book was a non-fiction parenting manual - Happy Kids, published in 2010.
In April 2010, the author released her first novel, The Girl in the Mirror. Based on a true story, the novel centres on Mandy, a woman in her 20s who sets out to rediscover her past after buried childhood memories start to surface.
Her latest memoirs: I Miss Mummy on a four-year-old girl who was placed into temporary care with Glass and could not understand why she had to leave her grandparents- who were judged by social services to be too old to look after her- then was expected to be sent to her father despite the grandparents' vehement objections; Mummy Told Me Not To Tell, about a boy, "Reece", who had genetic disabilities and was neglected, becoming so disturbed he bit strangers and was permanently excluded from two schools by age seven; and My Dad's A Policeman, about a bullied girl whose single mother was unable to care for her due to her alcohol problems and who had never known a father- but lied to school bullies that he was a policeman in the hope of making them go away- were published in 2010 and 2011.
"Happy Adults"- a self-help guide which will be Glass's first work not specifically dealing with children- will be published later this year.
Popularity and critical appraisal
Glass's first book Damaged was a number 1 Sunday Times bestseller, both in hardback and paperback. To date her books have sold 0.7 million copies. Cathy's books are also available in large print and have been translated into DanishDanish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
and Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
.
As her books deals with harrowing subjects, Glass has been placed by some critics within the Misery Literature
Misery lit
Misery lit is a term ostensibly coined by The Bookseller magazine that describes a genre of biographical literature mostly concerned with the protagonist's triumph over personal trauma or abuse, often during childhood...
genre. In a 2007 article on Misery Lit, Daily Telegraph writer Ed West cited Glass's Damaged as being among “the most disturbing recent examples of the genre.”. Despite the assessment of Misery Lit by Peter Saxton, biography buyer for Waterstone's, that books in the genre appeal to readers because "Misery, in whatever form, sells, and probably always will.", it has been noted by Guardian journalist Esther Addley that Glass's work offers "a certain amount of hope". In an interview with the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
in February 2009, Glass said that she had received "thousands" of letters and emails from readers who had either related to her novel or had been inspired to foster children themselves.