The Glass Castle: A Memoir (edition 2006)

While reading this, I kept thinking to myself, "This can't be real. She's got to be making this up. How does anyone survive this kind of childhood?" I still can't decide of the author is telling the truth or stretching it a little (or a lot). It doesn't matter. This is still an excellent read. ( )

The author
Jeannette Walls is a writer and journalist. She was born in Phoenix, Arizona on the first of January 1960. She graduated with honors from Barnard College, the women's college affiliated with Columbia University. She published a bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book is being made into a film by Paramount.

The synopsis
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town—and the family—Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.

The review
I put this book on my to read list because some people read it for a biography challenge and it had a high rating. I usually do not read biographies but they all said it was entertaining en well written and worth a try. It came down from my to read list as a buddy read because it was the one book my buddy and I had in common. And I am not sorry.
What an interesting read this books make. The author has really vivid memories of her life and has been able to write them down so well it really starts to live. Though the story is harsh to read, realizing it really happened, it also gave me a feeling of love and hope. It was entertaining too specially the first years gave me the feeling I was reading a children s adventure book. The one you want to be a part of as a child cause these people do awesome things. I am happy the author found the courage to share her special live with us. ( )

Walls's childhood is quite frankly unbelievable . Hers is a story that will tug at your heart-strings and make you cheer for her every step of the way. The whole time I was reading it, I kept wondering if her life would have been different is she grew up now instead of when she did. ( )

Unbelievable, fascinating, sad memoir. ( )

I think highly of the memoir. It is by a woman describing her youth and adult life having had to cope with parents who were addicted to various behaviors. Taking place in the 50s and 60s mostly, it is a child's version of events which brought about who she came to be. Very rewarding to read this and be so unflinching about the proximity to total despair. Walls lived in Central and Northern California but settled in W. Virginia. Very short chapters makes this a very fast read. ( )

I really enjoyed this book; read it super fast. I didn't pay much attention to the writing style. I was just completely pulled into the story of her family. I appreciated the straight forward style and I thought it was edited very well--very little whining and excess prose.
Her parents made me so mad, though. I kept getting distracted by my anger at them. I wonder what it says about me that I lacked even a drop of pity for them. Their kids, on the other hand, were truly amazing and resilient creatures that I rooted for the entire time. ( )

Jeanette Walls recalls her childhood in this biography. As a teacher, I appreciated Walls' recollections, as it helped me to understand some of the trauma and instability that many of my students face. While I am struggling to help them learn, many are attempting to just survive, while in a safe place for 7 hours. It is incredible that Walls and three of her siblings were able to survive their upbringing, or lack thereof, and to become functioning adults. The self-centeredness of both her parents made me nauseated as I read. Walls' father taking her out to a bar, and allowing a man to sexually assault his own child! Stealing money from his own children to drink himself silly, while they practically starved! These are just two of the many incidences in which I found myself clenching my teeth and praying the children would have survived. Throughout the book, I was sickened that Walls and her siblings were always on the verge of danger and/or death. This book enabled me to see that the human spirit is far more resilient than I give it credit. ( )

Wonderful autobiography of woman who grows up under extraordinary circumstances. Her mother was narcissistic in a clinical sense. It's amazing to realize she survived all that she describes. ( )

I know I'm in the minority here but I just didn't latch onto this book the way many others have. ( )

I think it's a 3.5 stars. I enjoyed reading it, but I wasn't enthralled or totally captivated.

I felt the emotions most people probably did reading it -- loved the kids' sense of adventure, acceptance, and family in the first half of the book. Hated the Dad and Mom in the later part for their lack of responsibility and for the cycles they fell in.

What I find really interesting is how factual most of the story is relayed. This is what happened. This is the way it was. The author conveys her emotions from that time, but does not seem to have any current emotions in her memories. She has removed herself. Therapy?

A few additional thoughts: the Walls kids were adept at overcoming their circumstances and doing their best to appear normal despite the poverty at home -- a reminder that we don't always know the backgrounds of those around us, and we should not be quick to judge poverty, either.
Second, I find it interesting how stereotypical the parents come across, particularly when they are street people in New York. The mother especially. Finally, the summer when the author is in charge of the money but can't say no to her father is very successful in stopping any judgements from the reader along the vein of "I would have said no". It does not say "don't judge" but it removes the opportunity. Neat.

Oh, and I'm very grateful for my own cushy upbringing, though I'm probably not as tenacious as those kids. Which reminds me -- they seemed to get on very easily in NewYork City. I wonder if that's true, or if, for them, after their past it just felt much easier. ( )

An amazing memoir about a girl who grew up in an unconventional, often dysfunctional and sometimes absolutely abusive and neglectful family -- but who is able to look back at it with love, wonder, and recognition from what she gained from her upbringing. Both inspiring and disturbing -- Jeannette and her siblings should have been taken away from their parents for their own protection, yet her parents also gave her love, intellectual challenge, self-reliance, and a determination to succeed. It makes me wonder -- at what point does genius and a refusal to follow conventional rules go too far? ( )

Excellent! ( )

The Glass Castle is one of the best accounts of a dysfunctional family that I’ve read. Walls’s honesty and candor bring poverty, delusion, and addiction to the forefront and paints a realistic picture of how each can affect a family.

In The Glass Castle, Walls tells her story of a harsh and nomadic childhood moving from one town to another with her brilliant, but paranoid and alcoholic father, an artistic, but neglectful and eccentric mother and three siblings, never staying more than a few months in one place (and oftentimes periods of homelessness), before finally settling in the impoverish and shabby town of Welsh, WV. There she lives for two years in a dilapidated, three-room shack with no electricity or running water until she turns 17, then follows her oldest sister to NYC to complete her senior year in high school. The plan is to establish residency in New York so she can attend Barnard College on a less costly, in-state tuition. Six years later Walls graduates from Barnard with honors leading to a successful career in writing, including securing a job with MSNBC (which she leaves in 2007 to write full time).

What I love most about this particular memoir, other than its authenticity, is that Walls recounts her childhood in an open and honest way, never overdoing it with wordy sentences or a complicated storyline. She tells her story without resentment and with a genuine love for her parents, despite their irresponsible and sometimes horrific parenting skills that attributed to most of the struggles she faced growing up. It's a story of love, hope, sorrow, neglect, addiction, hardship, anguish and triumph. Above all, I found her story inspiring.

The book is currently being made into a film by Paramount. I hope they do the book justice, but oftentimes I find the film pales in comparison to the book it is based on. ( )

This is the story of Jeannette Walls's childhood growing up with a father who adored his children but who also neglected them shamefully and became downright scary when he drank. Her mother was a carefree spirit who couldn't be bothered to take care of her children. She thought it was good for them to learn to take care of themselves. The first story we get from Jeannette's childhood involves the horrible burns she sustained while cooking hot dogs for herself at the age of three. Childhood doesn't really get any better from there.

I'm torn on rating this book. I read it in one day. I really couldn't put it down. But at the same time, this isn't the normal kind of book I read and I can't really say that I enjoyed it. I know that's not really the point with this kind of memoir, but I do typically choose to read for enjoyment. I don't really have much to say about it. I'm not a fan of non-fiction, but this did "read like fiction." I feel like I've read a memoir somewhat similar to this in the past. I know everyone's story is different, but I really think that reading the story of a charming alcoholic's daughter one time was enough for me. This was one time too many. I'd give it three stars except for the fact that I really did rip right through it. ( )

Mrs. Beamer's Review:
I loved this book...loved everything about it. The above Goodreads blurb does an outstanding job of summarizing this memoir. The book is addicting...both heart-wrenching and heart-warming.

Full disclosure...I only read this book because it was mentioned as possible required reading for the 10th grade Honors English class at our school. Controversy has followed this memoir since its publication - mainly regarding its age-appropriateness for high school students. I needed to see (read) for myself. Bottom line...whatever critics of this book believe, in my opinion, the positives WAY WAY WAY outweigh the negatives. Personally, I can't wait for my own children to read it. I won't dissect the validity of this book in relation to the course objectives, etc (I'll leave that to the English teachers!). But I will say this memoir offers countless opportunities for discussion and reflection.

Jeannette's childhood is one of disbelief. I often found myself thinking "seriously...how is this lifestyle even possible today?!" Yet, as riveting as her upbringing was, what hooked me were the relationships between the family members. Jeannette does an outstanding job of sharing her family with the reader. I felt like I understood it all...like it all made sense (even when, in theory, it shouldn't). Read it for yourself. It's outstanding.

Mrs. Beamer’s Wrap-Up Rating: 0-5 (0=none, 5=lots) click here for more info
Language: 3.5
Violence: 1
Sexual Content: 2.5
Drugs/Alcohol: 3
Recommend for High School Libraries: YES
Comfortable With My Child Reading: high school ( )

My mother, without preamble, plopped this on my table and said, "Read this." You should see this copy: The cover is creased and stained and permanently flips up as if someone curled it back behind the book (a habit I hate!), the pages are, well, not unblemished. But it has valid excuse. Apparently this book has been passed from person to person as people have read it and loved it and just NEEDED someone else to read it too. Unfortunately, the buck stops with me, because I didn't LOVE this book, although it was interesting, and even funny, at times.

I understand why my mother liked this book. She can identify with it, at least to a point. Her own mother is a "free-spirit", who, while not nearly as irresponsible as Jeannette's mother, was known to be flighty from time to time. She, thankfully, did not take matters to the length and extent that Jeannette's parents did, and while sharing their ideal for self-sufficiency, did not reduce her family to below-poverty levels to foster it.

I am not really a 'memoir person', and when I saw that this book was lumped in with Angela's Ashes, which I did not like AT ALL, I was seriously concerned. I have this tendency to prejudge memoirs and auto-biographies (and even sometimes biographies if the subject contributed to it) as being embellished and sensationalized and, perhaps not outright lies, but truth stretched to the point of no return. And so I tend to read such books with a skeptical eye, thinking, "Really? Is that your final answer on how it REALLY happened? OK... {Insert big, dramatic wink here.} If you say so, I believe you!"

I felt strongly that Angela's Ashes was fabricated and exaggerated, not to mention poorly written -- I mean, would it KILL the guy to use a pair of quotation marks once in a while? -- but as I read The Glass Castle, that feeling kind of went away. A little.

Maybe it was Jeannette's detached, unjudgemental way of telling the story. Maybe it was the simple, unaffected (*Ahem* Angela's Ashes) writing that made it resonate with a lot more honesty than I initially felt it would. She didn't write with "Oh, poor pitiful me" oozing out of every line. I can't say that everything in the book is 100% true, because as Jeannette's mom says, perception is everything, and the perception of a three year old girl being recalled and written by a thirty-something year old woman can't be exactly 100%. But I did not feel that she was outright lying, or fictionalizing her childhood and calling it a memoir.

There were some laugh out loud moments for me, which surprised me, and I think unarmed me a little. I think that these moments are what changed this from a fully-skeptical read, to a mostly-accepting read. The first moment is when Jeannette's mother is trying to sew clothes, and does a horrendous job of it, ending up with (paraphrase) "pillow case dresses with elephant trunks hanging off the sides and armholes in the middle of the backs"; the second was Jeannette's home-made braces, which morphed into something resembling a torture device: A bent wire coathanger with hooks to hold rubber bands in place. Said rubber bands to go completely around the head and pull buckteeth back where they belong. But I guess I would take desperate measures too if I was told that I should be thankful of my buckteeth as they might come in handy if I ever needed to eat an apple through a fence knothole.

This was an interesting book, and despite all the things that Jeannette's parents did for themselves without thought of their kids, they seem to have inexplicably done something right anyway and raised well-rounded, successful children. ( )

Stark, unadorned retelling with surprisingly very little judgment towards the events of her early life, Jeanette Walls crafts a fairy-tale memoir as viewed, in reverse, from a cracked and dirty mirror. A reflection on the self-affirming past that we tell ourselves existed when we were really just gifting Venus.

A valid point from the NYT's review by Francine Prose "At times, the litany of gothic misfortune recalls Harry Crews's classic memoir, ''A Childhood.'' The two books have striking similarities; both, for example, feature the horrific scalding of a child. But to think about Crews's book is to become aware of those mysterious but instantly recognizable qualities -- the sensibility, the tonal range, the lyrical intensity and imaginative vision -- that distinguish the artist from the memoirist, qualities that suggest the events themselves aren't quite so interesting as the voice in which they're recounted." ( )

I've had the hardest time deciding how to rate this book because it is extremely well written in the only style I think could possibly work for what seems like so outlandish a story, but it's a kind of book I'm not a big fan of reading myself. I've decided to sort of average things out because I just can't convince myself to give 5 stars to something I found so hard to get through. I was listening to a children's audio book about a dysfunctional family at the same time I was reading this which combined to make me even angrier at parents who have children without being interested in actually taking care of those children. Throughout Walls' memoir I actually found myself having more sympathy with the dad because he clearly loved his kids even though he was a broken man and couldn't take care of them well while the mother didn't seem to care about anyone but herself. The entire family's response (or lack thereof) to sexual abuse of the children was perhaps the most appalling part of the story but the entire book was really maddening.

COTC Book Club November 2010 selection. ( )

This was a hard book to read. There were times I had to put it down and walk away because it made me so angry. No child should have to live like that. Since I'd already read 'Half Broke Horses' throughout the book, I would become angry at Rose Mary when I felt she had not lived up to the potential her mom gave her to BE a good mom! And the dad....wow! Such a wasted life. He obviously had a great deal of knowledge and intelligence, but never got control of his drinking OR is need to always be right and flaunt authority, so in the end, he was not able to contribute what he might otherwise been able to contribute to the world.

The most amazing part to me is that 4 children survived this mess of a childhood and most did well as adult. For any parent who sometimes wonders, 'am I a bad parent'....THIS is the book for you! Just a couple of chapters and you will feel really good about your parenting. ( )

Well-written and extremely readable, but all in scene with very little reflection or space spent making sense of her parents' actions and motivations. I found the lack of reflection frustrating throughout, and was especially angered at the end when she lets her parents off the hook so quickly. ( )

Rarely have I been as interested in someone’s family, in the narrative sense, as I was in Jeanette Walls’ family, as detailed by her in her 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle. The only families that come close (and I can pitch these three reads in no particular order of excellence) are those featured in Burroughs’ Running with Scissors , and A Wolf at the Table, and in Lit by Mary Karr (still to read her highly acclaimed The Liar’s Club ... soon, soon). This memoir is a faithful recounting of her difficult and disadvantaged childhood as narrated through the voice of her younger self. Her gradual building of the scenarios and relationships of her youth, and those of her siblings, make for a compelling read.

Unlike the characters in the latter memoirs, Walls seems to have avoided divulging any of her personal dysfunction (in fact, she seems to have turned out fairly ‘together’) and leads the reader to construe it for themselves through the reading of her dirt-poor childhood. Most successfully, she manages to capture the complexity of her parents, who cascade from neglect to a strange kind of love to high intelligence to unfathomable eccentricity. She avoids blame, and this elevates the memoir to a level of compassion and deep understanding of the familial fragilities of all concerned. As readers we are moved to hate the parents, love them, condemn them, and forgive them - never resting in any one place for too long.

Yet in spite of all their neglectful child-rearing, I left the memoir with empathy for Walls’ parents. They were wayward and often negligent parents. They had multiple opportunities and squandered them, either by way of alcoholism or plain selfishness, and they were never truly functional long enough to build a nurturing, functional family (yes, this is relative, I know  ). Regardless of this, Walls presents us with multitudes of snapshots that reveal the love her parents had for their kids – from her father’s pride in her eventual academic career, to his reading of every book on her college reading list alongside her (despite his homelessness) in support. I couldn’t help reflecting on the many so-called functional people I’ve come across who hadn’t displayed that kind of interest in their kids’ lives, despite their privileges.

Memoir is my big interest area, and knowing the stature that this memoir holds as an exemplary model of the genre, I was keen to read it. It has not disappointed. Walls has an engaging writing style and the end result is a masterful example of the narratorial voice of a child. It’s truly a memorable read ... a book that takes up residence in your inner landscape, giving you enough insight into the complexities of human nature to leave you, forever, a little bit changed.

[b:Running With Scissors|242006|Running With Scissors|Augusten Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316137284s/242006.jpg|828773]
[b:A Wolf at the Table|2145681|A Wolf at the Table|Augusten Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311981389s/2145681.jpg|2216670]
[b:Lit: A Memoir|6340016|Lit A Memoir|Mary Karr|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1348616536s/6340016.jpg|6526004] ( )

I'm not a huge memoir fan, but this was pretty well written. I just lose interest in lots of memoirs (An Unquiet Mind and The Liars' Club come to mind). I'm also not a huge fan of books that show up on the paperback best seller list for long periods of time because I'd like my book clubs to pick out books from whatever time period because they're great books, not because they're bestsellers and would make good movies. Part of my two book groups run on misery picks! ( )

Well-written and extremely readable, but all in scene with very little reflection or space spent making sense of her parents' actions and motivations. I found the lack of reflection frustrating throughout, and was especially angered at the end when she lets her parents off the hook so quickly. ( )

These are seriously the worst parents ever! But the author makes the story amusing, even while it's horrifying. Love this book! ( )

Walls has given us an elegant memoir of growing up with difficult parents. When we first meet the family, though we as adult readers may experience some concern, Walls' child narrator sees only the adventure and excitement of her circumstances. Her father is a smart, charismatic eccentric; her mother, an artist from a privileged background who has renounced her own family's values and social class. Walls and her siblings adore and admire their parents (while already having some uneasy inklings that parents ought to protect their children more assiduously). As the narrator ages, her perspective on her parents shifts; it's also probably the case that their oddities became more pronounced. Her father's drinking and inability to manage the interpersonal aspects of a job become more prominent, while her mother withdraws farther from reality and responsibility. An especially grim section of the narrative takes place in West Virginia, where they appear to be the poorest of the poor in their community.

Walls is a good writer and the effort of reading this is emorional, not literary. I hope we'll see more from her. Read with Laura Love's You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes for another narrative about growing up with an unstable mother, and Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast for a fictional similar situation and developmental dynamic between father and child.

For some reason, narratives about families are classified under "sociology" these days. I'd put it in "psychology" myself, but suit yourself. ( )