Cathy Glass (author)

Cathy Glass
Occupation	Author, writer, foster carer
Nationality	British
Genres	Inspirational memoirs, fiction
www.cathyglass.co.uk

Cathy Glass is a British author, freelance writer and foster carer.

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 bestsellers 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.

Early life and fostering

Glass used to work for the Civil Service 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.

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 journalism 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 suffered maltreatment in a dysfunctional and educationally subnormal family with a horrifying secret; My Dad's A Policeman, about a bullied child 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 and When The Angels Come describing Cathy looking after a child who had tragically lost his parents through illness, having never been abused or neglected unlike most of the children that had been in her care- were published in 2010 and 2011.

Glass' next true-life story, A Baby's Cry, deals with the unusual request of social services for her to foster a baby (most of her experience being with older children and adolescents) under strict secrecy, with even less information than is usually provided to carers. It is released in February.

"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 Danish, 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.