Jeanette Walls’ “The Glass Castle” is a powerful and engaging memoir that just might be the next book to add to your reading list. Although some may recognize this title from its 2017 movie adaptation starring Brie Larson, checking out Walls’ original writing and retelling of her unorthodox childhood is well worth the time.
This memoir is an account of Walls’ childhood growing up with her two eclectic parents and three siblings. Walls opens her memoir with a memory of burning herself while trying to cook herself hot dogs at the age of three. When she spills the pot of boiling water on herself, she spends several weeks in the hospital recovering—until her father stages a “jailbreak,” sweeping Walls out of the hospital and onto the open road. From this one memory, Walls gives readers an excellent snapshot of her life, in which her parents reject conventional society and are constantly off on another “adventure,” relying on an ever-building mountain of lies which threatens to collapse any sense of security they manage to build.
At first, the Walls children buy into their parents’ lives and find themselves content with traveling the country at a moment’s notice; they are unlike other children, unique and special for their unconventional family. However, as the children grow older, they begin to realize the truth and hope for stability. When the family is finally forced to settle down in a dilapidated home in their father’s hometown, the children begin to settle into this new way of life. At school, they find a comforting routine. However, home is a different story. With an alcoholic father and unemployed artist mother, Walls and her siblings fall deeper and deeper into poverty. They come up with new ways to stretch food, repair caving ceilings and do odd jobs to save money. As they grow, they find their parents becoming more and more incapable of caring for them and begin to take on after-school jobs to make ends meet. Eventually, as Walls’ eldest sister Lori approaches graduation day, the siblings band together to escape their parents’ household. They save every extra cent in an effort to send the oldest child to New York City, where she can find a job and apartment until the rest of the children are ready to join.
As the novel draws to a close, the author recounts how each of the Walls children made their way to New York City, finding jobs, stable housing and building lives which seem worlds apart from how they were raised. Despite this, the Walls parents still haunt their children, making their way into the city where they “choose” to live on the streets as squatters. Though the children do their best to provide for their parents, the pair are content as “outsiders” to society.
Overall, this roller coaster of a memoir is a read which is hard to put down. Faced with one dilemma after another, the perseverance Walls and her siblings show is a powerful message to readers. Walls’ writing style reflects her many years of experience, and her candidness in telling her story is something few are able to achieve. If you’re looking for a read that’s realistic, yet has many twists and turns, this may be worth investigating.
