Library & Literary Miscellany

The Glass Castle: A Memoir (Alex Awards (Awards)) 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, Julia Scheeres’ Jesus Land: A Memoir, J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club: A Memoir, Nicole Lea Helget’s The Summer of Ordinary Ways: A Memoir, and Rick Bragg’s All over but the Shoutin’.

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Soldier Boy by Ishmael Beah (2007)

“My imagination at ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness of the refugees.”

Two years later, twelve-year-old Ishmael Beah is “touched by war,” and he no longer has to imagine the misery and desolation wrought by war. Ishmael sets out from home in Mogbwemo to perform at a talent show in the town of Mattru Jong with his brother and friends as a boy full of youth, mischief, and dreams of fame as a rap star; he winds up traveling down the path to become a soldier boy whose innocence, home, and dreams are quickly and irrevocably destroyed.

After the boys find out the Revolutionary United Front rebels have struck their village, they set out together, but they soon became aware that others regard them with suspicion: “People were terrified of boys our ages”. The longer Ishmael and his friends wander facing constant suspicion and imminent starvation, the more susceptible they become to recruitment into the role of child soldiers.

After a protracted period of wandering full of fear and uncertainty, Ishmael enters a town full of Sierra Leone Army soldiers. These soldiers offer him drugs, brainwash him, and set him on a certain course–merciless killing. The lieutenant tells the boys the rebels are the enemy: “They have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil. It is the highest service you can perform for your country.” and “We are not like the rebels, those riffraffs who kill people for no reason. We kill them for the good and betterment of this country.” From age thirteen to sixteen, Ishmael places his faith in these beliefs and he kills gratuitously and without remorse.

When Ishmael is sixteen, members of UNICEF pluck him out of the army and set about releasing Ishmael from his life’s destructive path. At first, he is unhappy to be rescued and separated from his squad and his gun, “My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed.” However, he is sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown where he receives care and counseling enough that he recognizes how the soldiers lied to him, what evil he had committed against his fellow humans, and how he needs to break free in order to have a chance at a humane, sane future. As Ishmael begins to rediscover who he was before he was turned into a child soldier, he finds himself faced with a new task–to go before the United Nations and illuminate the realities of life for child soldiers.

Beah’s candid reporting of the extremes of brutality and depravity make the memoir all the more gutwrenching and disconcerting. After he concludes his memoir, Beah provides historical context for the events he recounts noting how Sierra Leone suffered a fate similar to other former British colonies upon gaining freedom–civil strife, corruption, and military brutality reigned supreme and the children, along with everyone else, suffered because of it.

Unfortunately, recently the veracity of details of Ishmael Beah’s experiences have come into question by a reporter for The Australian (citing factors such as chronological anomalies); see Peter Wilson’s Thanks for the Memories for more information. Beah has issued a rebuttal statement that addresses some of these criticisms.

In the end, while the details of Beah’s reporting of events are not above dispute, his story still serves as a not-at-all gentle reminder of the atrocity that is the existence of child soldiers. The existence of child soldiers is without dispute, and Beah’s text–his sparse recounting of such flagrant violence by ones so young–precludes reader’s complacent thought in this regard.

For those who wish to read more fiction and/or nonfiction relating to African wars, Sierra Leone, and/or child soldiers, a few suggestions follow:

Fiction–Moses, Citizen & Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (African Wars, child soldiers), Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English by Ken Saro-Wiwa (African Wars, child soldiers), or Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna (African Wars, Sierra Leone), Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (child soldiers, Card’s other books such as Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead speak to child soldiers as well)

Nonfiction–Children at War by P.W. Singer (African wars, child soldiers), Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy by J. Peter Pham (African wars, child soldiers, Sierra Leone), Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Ugandas Children by Grace Akallo (African wars, child soldiers), Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War by Jimmie Briggs (child soldiers), Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeldor (African wars), or One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War (P.S.) by Charles London (African wars, child soldiers)

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