Because You Want to Book Club #16: "The Glass Castle"

I like to think I know a thing or two about living through an impecunious childhood, but Jeanette Walls has effectively taught me that I don’t know as much about storytelling as I think I do. Her memoir, “The Glass Castle”, is a book of style and grace in the face of sometimes overwhelming and unforeseen setbacks. To say I admire her achievements would be an understatement. “The Glass Castle” is the most powerful memoir I have read in years.

Jeanette and her older sister and younger brother have had a rootless childhoods. Their mother was an old school hippy who didn’t believe in rules, discipline, or even really caring about or for her children in the slightest and was often cold and cruel towards them. Their father was a brilliant, but mentally damaged self-taught man with delusions of finding gold and building a glass castle for his family to live it. He also had a hair trigger temper and battled the bottle at every turn. Their father couldn’t keep a job longer than a few months and their mother refused to do anything other than work on her art projects at home. As such, they constantly moved to avoid paying overdue rent or to avoid creditors. The book starts the family out in the desert mining towns of the Southwest where they moved at such an alarming rate that making friends turned out to be impossible. From there they moved to West Virginia where things grew far worse and the were poorer than ever before. But as things got worse, the resiliency of the children grew, as did the bond between them. It wasn’t that their parents didn’t love them, because Jeanette is quick to point out that they did; they were just emotionally stunted human beings. One by one the kids all left for New York City and their parents followed despite being completely homeless. Jeanette had created such a life for herself away from her family that she was mortally embarrassed upon seeing her mother digging through dumpsters.

I have never had siblings and I was never homeless as a child surrounded by family, but in terms of what it is like to be poor, homeless, alone, and ashamed of what your family has done to you, I can relate entirely. No other memoir has ever come close to the power of “The Glass Castle”. The story unfolds in a series of brief vignettes that come together as a spectacular whole. Walls writes in a clear and matter of fact tone. Things happened the way they did and Walls never questions them for a second or wonders how she could have changed it or what would have happened otherwise. The facts are there in front of her and that is more than enough. Walls has written the quintessential book of dysfunctional family dynamics and no one since Judith Guest’s fictional “Ordinary People” has ever come close.

Grade: A+. A must read.