Wow. An amazing book by an amazing writer. I couldn't put this down. ( )

Zvirin, S. (2005). The glass castle. Booklist, 101(11), 923. Retrieved October 29, 2009, from Article Citation database.

This book is amazing. The most amazing thing about it is that it is a memoir, which means it's all more or less true. This is the story of the girlhood of someone who grew up in an environment of extreme neglect. The second of four children, her parents consisted of a violent drunk father and a mother who felt the world owed her everything and she owed it--and her children--nothing. The story opens when the author, at the age of three, using the stove unsupervised, catches her dress on fire and is severely burned. The parents can't or won't hold down jobs and the family is often starving, the children resorting to eating food out of the school cafeteria trash cans after the other children have left. The parents always seem to have the attitude that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, not even coming to the rescue when their children are sexually assaulted. I could go on and on about the awful things these children experienced and in general this is definitely not a happy story, but what is most striking about this story is how the author never talks about anything negatively. The attitude of the narrative always seems to be that this is just another adventure. Through it all, there is love in this family. Despite everything that happens, the ties that bind this family seem to remain just as strong or stronger than those of other more stable, more normal families. ( )

very goo read. ( )

Oh. My. God.

Walls has a non-fiction novel coming out this month, so I decided to re-read the book that started all the ruckus before I got Half-Broke Horses.

A little backstory: I was romantically involved with a man for some time while I lived in Austin, whom I met on a bus. I got on the bus, sat a few seats behind the cute, sandy-haired, rumpled guy with the prominent ears I spotted from the pay-stile, and sighed the happy sigh of one whose world contains all the things he needs: A job, a home, and all the men he can mentally undress and ravish.

I was mid-mental ravishment when Blondie upset the applecart by bursting into tears. As quietly as he could, of course, but tears. A stop later, still crying. Stop after that, still crying. I got up, moved into the seat next to him across the aisle, and said, "What the hell're you reading? I wanna be sure I never set an eyeball on it." That got a laugh, and he held up The Glass Castle and said it was sort of the story of his life.

We talked for four hours that day. I gave him my email and number, and things progressed pretty smoothly until August of last year, but that's another story.

He'd just read Walls's tale of her father taking her pubescent self to a pool-hall and getting her within an inch of getting raped, just so he'd have beer money. It struck a chord, and the story of his own stepfather's abuses of Mr. Man came spewing out of him. I've read the book before just now, specifically so I could discuss it with Mr. Man, but I did so with an already numbed horror bone and a severed humor tendon.

Only now that I am several years beyond that initial encounter with the book can I see how very funny the tragic events in it are, and were to the author. I can see that it's gallows humor of a sort...but also that it's all perfect proof that life's a Zen joke.

If you can chuckle at Dolly Parton's apercu, "You have no idea how much it costs to look this cheap," then Walls is the next step up the Sisyphean slope of learning how to laugh like the Dalai Lama. It's a hard life that etches grooves in the looking-glass, but it's a path worth taking if you can get to the place where "textured" is valued more than smooth. Read the book, you'll know what I mean. ( )