Books and Movies

I am probably one of the last book bloggers to get around to reading the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I finished listening to the audiobook yesterday, and now I know that all the raving about it was justified.

The Glass Castle is Jeannette’s story of growing up in an odd and completely disfunctional family. The book’s opening scene is Jeannette in a New York taxi, heading to a party in Manhattan. She looks outside and sees a homeless person rummaging through the trash. Not unusual for New York - except that this particular homeless person is Jeannette’s mother.

She then goes on to tell her story, starting with her first memory at age three. She was standing at the stove, cooking hotdogs in a frilly dress. The dress caught fire, and she spent six weeks in the hospital with burns that needed skin grafts. After she is back home, we find her once again cooking hotdogs for herself. Her mother, who is busy painting, responds with, “Good for you. You have to get right back on that horse.” Did I mention that she was three?

The Walls family lived for the first years of Jeannette’s life in the desert in California and Arizona. They lived in poverty, moving from place to place, sometimes having a home, sometimes sleeping outside under the stars. When they did stay in one place long enough for the children to attend school, Jeannette remembers rummaging in the trash in the girls’ rest room at school so that she could eat the leftovers that girls had thrown away from their lunches.

When her parents get the urge to move again, they end up in Welch, West Virginia, a coal mining town. Their “home” is a rundown shack without an indoor bathroom. The kids again starve, while their mother spends money on art supplies and hoarded chocolate bars, and their father spends their money staying drunk.

I know this sounds like a really depressing book, and parts of it were very heartbreaking, but Jeannette’s spirit and determination to make something better of her life, no matter what circumstances she found herself in, made it impossible to put down. And as abusive and neglectful as the Walls were, Jeannette isn’t bitter. In fact, you get the sense that her parents loved her and the other kids the best way they knew how. They just didn’t know how to be parents. Part of the reason for this is explained when they move to Welch and meet her father’s parents, though I never felt like I understood what made the mother the way she was.

Ms. Walls is a gifted storyteller, and she describes the events of her life from the perspective of her younger self. As she describes the scenes of her life, I could see her and her family in my mind’s eye. I wanted to shake her mother, throttle her father, and hug her. She writes her story with a clear eye for the reality of the awfulness of her childhood, but also with an affection for her family that comes through on every page.

5 out of 5 stars.

After I finished reading The Glass Castle and was doing some surfing for more information on Ms. Walls, I came across this interview.

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