Jeanette Walls
The Glass Castle (2005)
Author: Jeanette Walls
Genre: Memoir (Growing-Through Narrative)
Book Summary:
She caught fire when she was three, lived in the Mojave desert when she was four, fell out of a speeding car at five, and lived in a flophouse in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco at six. Jeannette Walls certainly never had a dull childhood, often doing the "skedaddle" in the middle of the night to avoide the "henchmen, bloodsuckers, gestapo, oil men, and federal investigators" that are after her family. Enigmatic father Rex Walls can't keep a job, drinks his family's food money, and is often abusive, yet he also buys his wife a piano, comes home with bicycles for his children, and rescues wounded buzzards. He teaches his children to do their second grade math homework in binary numbers, loathes the ordinary joes that go off to work everyday in their corporate prisons, and takes his blueprints to the Glass Castle with him on every move. Mother Rose Mary is just as eccentric as her husband, considers herself an artist of all mediums, doesn't believe in modern medicine, glasses, or nutrition, and is a self-professed "excitement addict". It is a turbulent and often injurious childhood for Jeannette, but one that slows down when her family moves across the country to stay with her paternal grandparents in Welch, West Virginia. Here the family's poverty becomes very real as the children are exposed to winter for the first time. School proves to be a saviour for all of the children when they are not getting picked on, as they can scavenge for discarded lunches in the garbage and at least be warm. As the family starts to fall apart and Rex's alcoholism and Rose Mary's enabling become more clear and mental health issues begin to manifest, Jeannette finds refuge in working for the school paper. What begins as a way to prolong the school day quickly becomes a calling for Jeannette; after her older sister escapes Welch for New York City, Jeannette begins to realize that the school paper might be a path to something bigger. SPOILER: Jeannette ends up moving to New York City at the end of high school, getting an internship at a small paper, and graduating from Barnard. Brother Brian moves to the city as well, and eventually Maureen, the youngest, arrives as well. Each of the children grows up to be successful and reasonably well-adjusted adults, and Jeannette Walls is a journalist for MSNBC. Her parents are street people in New York City, and they see each other occasionally. In an ABC News interview on 3/15/05, Jeannette described The Glass Castle "as an homage" to her parents for raising "some fairly fearless kids."
Geographical Setting: Desert towns of the Southwest, Phoenix and West Virginia
Time Period: Around the 1960s - present time
Appeal Characteristics:
Though their hardscrabble life is portrayed as lovingly as possible, there are incidents that may infuriate the reader. For example, upon informing her mother that Uncle Stanley had groped her, Jeanette was told that "sexual assault was a crime of perception" (184). A similar incident occurs when her father, a gambler, pimps her at a bar after exploiting a drunk pool player. "I'm sure he just pawed you some...I knew you could handle yourself," he consoled (213). Some may read this as a tale of child abuse, and others may appreciate the free-spirited wisdom of her parents, but this dichotomy is part of the allure. In telling the story without commentary, the reader is able to extrapolate both the magical and the terrible as they wish. Indeed, despite having serious subject matter and depicting several horrifying instances, the tone of the book never begins to approach the combination of self-pity and accusation that some similar books employ. Walls relates all of the incidents in the book with a simple matter of fact style that seems to undercut the serious nature of some of the events she's describing. Her family is portrayed warmly and lovingly, and it is clear that for all of their faults, this is a very loving and loyal family. There is also a sense of adventure that colors much of the narrative; Walls has an excellent eye (or memory?) for detail, and each locale is richly described, from the hollows of West Virginia to the deserts of Arizona. The memoir is fast-paced, and it is difficult to stop reading without having found out if Jeannette and her siblings made it in one piece, to say nothing of the reader's desperate hope that they make it out of dead-end Welch. The most appealing characteristic of the book then is Jeannette's ability to tell this story with compassion, humor, and a certain amount of detachment. This will appeal to readers who enjoy memoirs recounting struggle and achievement, those of overcoming childhood abuse, poverty, alcoholism, and stories of life in small towns. As of August 3, 2006, The Glass Castle was on the NYT top five best seller list for paperback nonfiction. It also won the ALA Alex Award, given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults. The choices represent outstanding adult fiction and non-fiction books that will interest many teen readers, ages 12-18.
Read-alikes: Readers interested in reading another "how on earth did they make it?" memoir by a now accomplished professional will appreciate Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, which details the author's childhood in a desolate East Texas oil town, complete with an artistic, alcoholic mother and volatile, alcoholic father. Although the writing style is not as compassionate as in Wall's book, the shocking events here are nevertheless depicted with a wry sort of humour. Similarly, those looking for a much, much darker version of Wall's story might enjoy Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors, a very dark look at his childhood with a mentally ill mother who offers him up for adoption to her therapist, and by extension, his "family", which includes a pedophile living in a shack in the back-yard; readers beware, those turned off by the red flags for The Glass Castle should NOT pick up Running With Scissors. Other suitable books by Burrough's include Magical Thinking: True Stories (2005) and Possible Side Effects (2006), both of which will leave you laughing, yet reeling at the outrageous childhood he survived. For another tale of a highly dysfunctional family memoir told in the same compassionate yet unapologetic tone as The Glass Castle, try Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart. Now a well-known journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, Gilmore is the youngest brother of Gary Gilmore, executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1977; the memoir details the violence prevalent in the brothers' childhood home, and the tragic cyclical nature of abuse, yet makes no apologies or excuses for Gary's behaviour, choosing instead to focus on how the events affected the living. For readers looking for a more light-hearted look at growing up, try David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of vignettes detailing everything from Sedaris' childhood in North Carolina, where his mother forbid her children to use the colloquial "y'all", to his struggles trying to learn French in Paris at thirty-something. Although his family is nowhere near as dysfunctional as some of the others mentioned here, Sedaris' writing style and wicked sense of humour is sure to please. Another well-written, unsentimental memoir to try is Julia Scheeres' Jesus Land, which details the author's childhood with ultra-conservative Christian parents and two adopted African-American brothers in rural Indiana, made all the more shocking for the fact that such abuse and hostility could be perpetrated so recently and by such self-professed devout parents. In her memoir, Jeannette mentions working as an MSNBC celebrity reporter, and drawing on those experiences, wrote Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip (2000). Dish is a well-organized expose of the escalating public demand for celebrity gossip - an interesting career considering the humble childhood we come to know in The Glass Castle. Falling: The Story of One Marriage (2000) might interest those whose curiousity has been piqued concerning Walls' husband, author John Taylor. In his own memoir, Taylor addresses the demise of his 11 year marriage (prior to Jeannette), chronicling the grief and strain with painful honesty. The Tender bar (2005) by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, J.R. Moehringer is another great story of childhood struggle amidst alcoholism and poverty, with an inspiring tone of success against all odds.
Red Flags: Depictions of animal cruelty, alcoholism, homelessness, theft, and sexuality, child molestations, gunslinging, occasional profanity
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