Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls (2005)
“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.”
Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, may begin with her adult self viewing her mother rooting through a dumpster but much of the book covers the period of her life leading up to that scene. Walls spends much of her youth waiting for her father to build her family the Glass Castle. Finally, as an adult with her father deceased, she ends up just writing about it instead. The result is The Glass Castle–Walls’ story of growing up as the daughter of Rex and Rose Mary Walls with three siblings and multiple homes and relocations and a will to survive.
She relates her family’s migrations from the Arizona desert to the rural mining town of Welch, West Virginia to the urban mecca New York City. She relates her father Rex’s brilliance and passion for life, for learning, for dreaming, for alcohol… She relates her mother’s passion for painting. And she relates the creative machinations she and her siblings (and, on a good day, sometimes her mother) derive to ensure the family’s little income gets spent on groceries instead of alcohol.
The book spans a wide period, from Jeannette’s earliest memories to her adult life. At the age of three, Jeannette burns herself badly while boiling hot dogs by herself. She calmly rationalizes the incident to an incredulous hospital staff:
“It was easy…You just put the hot dogs in the water and boil them. It wasn’t like there was some complicated recipe that you had to be old enough to follow.”
Even at three, Jeannette affirms her self-sufficiency, her strong will to survive, and her defense of her parents despite their questionable actions. These trends continue as she grows from a resilient child into a resilient woman. Interspersed with the nuclear family issues are the stories of abuse and trauma outside the home–caused by bullies, other relatives, poverty in general.
Years pass as the Walls family waits for Rex to place his family before alcohol and to build the Glass Castle he has promised them. They have all seen the masterful architectural plans that he has drawn up. When the family settles in West Virginia, Jeannette and the other kids further display their faith in their father by digging a hole to serve as the foundation for the castle.
Over time, instead of becoming a foundation for the Glass Castle, the hole becomes the Walls family’s private landfill in lieu of paying money for municipal garbage removal. And over time, the family’s faith in Rex similarly gets trashed. By the day Jeannette embarks for New York, she admits to herself and to her father that she doesn’t believe he’ll ever build The Glass Castle. She can no longer answer “No” with any conviction to Rex’s repeated question, “Have I ever let you down?”
The Walls children find that life in New York is not without its challenges (particularly after Rex and Rose Mary follow them there and embark upon a life of chronic peripateticism and periodic homelessness, conditions which their children work to mitigate normally to no avail). Yet, through it all, they stick together even as they continue to develop as individuals.
The Glass Castle is a striking memoir of human imperfection, human strength, and familial bonds. Page-by-page Jeannette Walls paints a picture of a flawed family whose love for each other somehow remains true. For her memoir’s masterful blend of individuality and community, of love and disgust, of despair and hope, of fallibility and perseverance, The Glass Castle has deservedly won an Alex Award and more than a few admiring readers (of which I am one).
If you’re looking for other memoirs that look deep into individual and family identity, a few suggestions include: Debra Marquart’s The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: a Memoir, Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents
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