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Erin Reads: the Cathy Glass extended universe
I’ve been working my way through the library’s collection of audiobooks by Cathy Glass, a long-time foster carer in the UK who writes about her experiences with different kids over the years. So here’s a post about some of those.
Most of them have really generic titles (“Cut“, “Neglected“, “A Terrible Secret”, “Girl Alone“, you get the picture), but the actual writing is detailed and engaging. She comes off like exactly the kind of person you’d want in this job: thoughtful and attentive, firm about setting boundaries but patient and tolerant with some pretty gnarly issues, detail-oriented enough to adapt to the new batch of paperwork and scheduling (so much scheduling!) that every case dumps on her. (Obviously this could just be her talking herself up, but I’ll be an optimist and hope it’s true.)
The overall foster system fails these kids in various ways on a regular basis, but there is some comfort if you jump around in the timeline, you see how much it improves over the years. The first book I read was I Miss Mummy, where Cathy’s oldest son is 14, and there are all these procedures and check-ins and reports. Then I jumped back to Cut, where the son is an infant and the kid is her second foster charge ever — and wow, a social worker basically just rolls up to her house and goes “here, this is your problem now.”
Cathy frequently has to give herself a bunch of ad-hoc education mid-case, sometimes because “psychiatry as a whole didn’t know what to make of this issue,” sometimes just “foster carers aren’t offered or required to get any pre-emptive training on this issue.” The girl from Cut self-harms (thus the title), this was at least a decade pre-internet, the best Cathy can do is visit her local library and find one (1) whole book about the subject. (Again, props to her. This kind of initiative is a trait you really want in someone with this job.)
Which leads to this dynamic where, as a reader in 2025, sometimes you’ll pick up on a pattern way earlier than the narrative gets around to acknowledging it.
I get the feeling there’s a legalistic dimension to that? Eventually Cathy gets very adept at “taking disclosures from abused children in a way that won’t get thrown out if it goes to court,” and part of that is about reporting exactly what was said, being verrrry restrained about adding your own inferences or interpretations.
(There’s a bit in I Miss Mummy where the kid describes her bio-dad putting “icing sugar” in a line and sniffing it, and Cathy is sure this was “probably” cocaine, which, the narration patiently explains, can also be taken by putting it in a line and snorting it. On first listen, I wondered if the target audience was “people who’ve never read or learned anything about cocaine in their lives.” A few books later, I’m thinking the target audience is “a hypothetical jury.”)
The latest book I finished is Damaged. Went and checked out the ebook, too, to make sure I cited everything correctly here:
There are 34 chapters. In chapter 4, Cathy describes the newly-arrived Jodie as having intense, distracted conversations with mysterious people that Cathy assumes are “imaginary friends.”
And I’m thinking, hm, is this kid plural?
Chapter 10, we get this exchange:
“I wasn’t safe with my daddy, was I, Cathy?”
“No you weren’t, pet. And because of that, [social worker] Eileen feels it would be better if you didn’t see either of your parents for a while, until it’s all sorted out.”
“OK, Cathy,” she said, not in the least perturbed. “I’ll tell her.” Then she stood up, and started a conversation with herself, in which she told Jodie she wasn’t seeing Mummy or Daddy because she had to be safe.
So now I’m thinking, look, this child is definitely some kind of system, are the adults in the book going to realize it?
Chapter 21, after two not-Jodie headmates firmly identify themselves (agreeable two-year-old Amy, and aggressive masculine Reg), Cathy describes all the symptoms so far to her social-services contact, who says “If I’m right, then it sounds like DID.”
Finally!
There’s some weird misinformation thrown into the dialogue…but thankfully, Cathy’s handling of Jodie-and-company stays very grounded in “managing the issues they actually have.” And it leads to the approval of enough funding to get Jodie in a full-time residential program with trained therapeutic staff, which by this point it’s very clear she needs.
There’s an “as happy as you can expect under the circumstances” ending: Jodie’s still in the residential program three years later, not healthy enough to be adopted out, but stable under what sounds like good professional care for a range of issues. Cathy and her kids are still in regular contact! (Meanwhile, a group of Jodie’s abusers got prosecuted, and half of them even got found guilty.)
The library only has one Cathy Glass audiobook left, and it’s on hold. Several of the others were too. Hopefully that level of popularity means they’ll order more of the set at some point.
In the meantime…I’d say “I’m listening to something cheerier,” but since finishing this book, most of my background-track-while-drawing audio has been (a) scam podcasts or (b) the latest season of Hoarders. Apparently it’s just that kind of week.
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I guess the surprising part is that Jodie got (a) left with a severely-abusive family for 7 years, but then (b) removed into the custody of someone who would care enough to notice her condition by the time she was 8. You would expect either "social services was competent enough to notice the abuse much sooner" or "social services was too incompetent/under-resourced to notice at all."
The epilogue has some pretty sharp words from Cathy about the state of Jodie's case -- it sounds like her file was just passed from one social worker to the next like a hot potato, with nobody even sitting down to read the whole thing, let alone count all the red flags. (Then the kid started a fire that nearly burned the house down, and that broke the spell, apparently.)
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(I've requested a purchase or interlibrary loan, but the way library budgets are these days, I'm not holding my breath. I do hope it comes through, though, because when it comes to "driving over an hour for a book" versus "just buying the book" I'm inclined to choose the latter.)
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