The Glass Castle: A Memoir (Alex Awards (Awards))
by Jeannette Walls
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeannette WallsEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-03-01
ISBN: 0743247531
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Product features:
- Condition: New
Book Reviews of The Glass Castle: A Memoir (Alex Awards (Awards))
Book Review: The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
Summary: 5 Stars
Nothing bonds a family like a dark secret, but imagine a New York socialite and gossip columnist who hid her past and later described her family as "aspiring to be white trash". The glass Castle is a riveting story of a marginal family who managed to remain close despite enduring a myriad of hardships brought on by parental neglect. The memoir of Jeanette Walls is ripe with riveting action, heart-wrenching disappointment, and social commentary. The Walls family existed like fleas on the dark underbelly of America travelling from town to town and living a meagre existence. Heading the family were a flighty alcoholic father and a mentally unbalanced, narcissistic mother. Despite all of the negative overtones within the book, the story is somewhat uplifting and occasionally witty. It lets us see a family bond from a new and unusual perspective, and it shows us that it is possible to survive a depraved upbringing and still prosper.
Walls begins her memoir by describing how on a trip to a Manhattan party, she saw her dishevelled mother rifling through a dumpster, and how she sunk down in the taxi for fear that her mother would recognise her. Her mother, Rose Mary Walls, was a free spirited artist who put her work and whims ahead of the needs of her own children. Rose Mary Walls allowed her 3-year-old daughter Jeanette to cook hotdogs on a gas range. Jeanette was severely burned and hospitalized until her father, Rex Walls, an intelligent but undisciplined scallywag, decided to spring her from the hospital. Rose Mary encouraged Jeanette to again cook on the gas stove by saying, "you can't live in fear of something a basic as fire." There were no shortages of fires in the story. Jeanette alluded that she often felt that fire was chasing her, and it was always ready for her to let her guard down. When the family lived in a San Francisco flophouse, it burnt to the ground. Jeanette accidentally started a chemical fire that trapped them and destroyed a work shed in Midland Depot CA. She gave an account of how her Dad had ordered a flaming desert for the family after a respectable winning streak at the Las Vegas casinos and she told of how she often played with fire for fun. She also mentioned that fire had destroyed her paternal grandparents home in Welch WV.
The story follows the family's misadventures as they moved from a trailer park in Southern Arizona, to Las Vegas, to San Francisco, to the Mojave Desert, to Midland Depot, to Battle Mountain, to Phoenix, then to Welch West Virginia, where the children eventually escaped their parent's influence by individually moving to New York. Jeanette's father Rex uprooted the family with little notice and regularity either because of his paranoia, or because he had used up all his available credit. Jeanette and her older sister, Lori, had to differentiate the places where they lived according to whether they had stayed long enough to unpack all of their meagre belongings. She also wrote that her father only gave them a few hours notice before moving the family and how he would only allow the children to bring a single item beyond the cloths on their backs. When a pet cat put up a fuss from the back seat of their crowded jalopy, Rex just reached back, grabbed the cat and tossed it out the window. Rose Mary told the kids not to be sentimental and that they could always get another cat.
The Children dealt with hunger, cold, and filth regularly. They usually had to fend for themselves and they often pleaded with their mother to provide support. While staying in the dank basement of Rex's parents home in West Virginia, they had to contend with a mean, drunken, morbidly obese, molesting grandmother. Their parents eventually put money down on what seemed like the most dilapidated house in West Virginia's entire coal belt, then moved in. Rex told his family that he would build them a magnificent glass castle on the property. But after the children spent countless hours digging a foundation, Rex ordered them to temporarily use the site as a garbage dump. At school and work Jeanette had to deal with racial tension, and prejudice over the fact that others perceived her family to be the poorest of the poor. Jeanette wrote that she hid in the bathroom of her high school during lunch breaks so that the other students wouldn't think that her family couldn't afford lunches. She eventually discovered that the other students often threw out half eaten lunches and she started retrieving what had been discarded from the garbage bin.
I found that the most telling image from her memoir was that of a Joshua tree that Rose Mary had stopped to paint in the desert. Jeanette asked her mother if she could take one of the nearby saplings with her, then nurture and care for it. Her mother refused. Rose Mary said that it was the harsh conditions that a Joshua tree endures that give its beauty. This also seemed to be her philosophy on child rearing: Give the children encouragement, an informal education but little else and see if they survive. In a non-judgmental fashion, Jeanette Walls has indicted her mother for rationalizing neglect, and even for justifying her feeble-minded brother-in-law's sexual advances against Jeanette by telling her that "sexual assault is a crime of perception: if you don't think you're hurt, you aren't." In reality, Rose Mary Walls' nonchalant attitude is likely a mask for her chronic depression. During the few periods where she held a teaching position, her children often had to fight with her to even get out of bed and go to her job at the local school.
Some reviewers have commented that the story line of this memoir seems a bit far-fetched, and why hadn't child welfare authorities been notified. Perhaps those reviewers have never had an opportunity to observe first-hand, the effects of extreme poverty and neglect, brought on by parents' mental imbalance. The Walls family were always surrounded by poverty so they were already removed from mainstream society. Jeanette mentioned that child welfare authorities had been alerted several times throughout the book, but since these people are usually overburdened with heavy caseloads, it's reasonable to think that they wouldn't have time to really follow through. Also, Rex was always ready to "pull up stakes and move on" when things got too hot.
Rex Walls had big dreams, and he was, by all accounts, extremely insightful if not brilliant. He continually tried to invent a complex machine that he called "the prospector," which could separate pure gold from low-grade ore, although his more immediate goal was to find the wherewithal to embark on another alcoholic bender and the occasional passage to a local whorehouse. His need for alcohol showed him stooping to deeper and deeper all-time lows as he stole the kids' food money and almost let 14-year-old Jeanette get raped in a road-house by a miner he had hustled $80 out of. He had knowledge of the natural world that he willingly passed on to his children, but he also expressed his paranoid opinions to them regularly. He used alcohol to hide from his demons, so he was never able to accomplish much beyond funding his vice. Jeanette, on the other hand, managed to harness her demons when she decided to come clean about her own past.
(Reviewed by Scott D. Bain June 2010)
Summary of The Glass Castle: A Memoir (Alex Awards (Awards))
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.
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis
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