Jeannette Walls proves in her amazing memoir that bad parenting and abject poverty don’t necessarily condemn children to a bleak future. In “The Glass Castle,” published in 2005 by Scribner, Walls reveals the intimate details of her upbringing in a dysfunctional but loving family.
“The Glass Castle” immediately grabs you with an opening scene in which Walls, now an adult in New York City, watches her mother rummage through a dumpster from the window of her cab. Her mother is homeless, one of those drifters we all see, but now suddenly you have to wonder how she would feel if that was your mother hanging on the fringes of our society.
From this shocking moment, Walls takes you back to his earliest memories. She is three years old and suffers a terrible burn to her torso when her dress catches fire while she is boiling hotdogs on the stove. A long stay ensues at the local hospital near where her family currently lives in Arizona while Walls recovers. To the hospital staff, the parents’ neglect is obvious, but Jeannette doesn’t associate the disapproving murmurs around her with her parents.
If any action is planned by social services, we never find out because her father, Rex Walls, plans an early release from the hospital in his trademark “Rex Walls style.” This means that he will grab his little girl and skip the hospital bill that he has no intention or way of paying.
Jeannette is taken to her father, mother, older sister, and younger brother, and the family sets off. It begins just one of many journeys where the Walls family ends up in dilapidated trailers and shacks in the deserts of Nevada, Arizona, and California. They stay somewhere for a while until Rex can’t pay the rent or doesn’t want to and they leave town and do it all over again.
Rex inspired the book’s title with the plans, lovingly crafted on paper, for his “glass castle” that he aspires to one day build. He often reassures his children with the promise of this fantasy home. It is a solar-powered house, but he first needs to raise the money to build it, which involves numerous gold prospecting schemes that are doomed to fail. Because panning for gold never pays the bills, Rex also finds work as an electrician or handyman. He’s smart and mechanically talented, but his earnings inevitably vanish in flash floods of alcohol that perpetually leave his family destitute.
In an immersive narrative that draws you deeper into an existence of almost unimaginable deprivation, we see Jeannette and her siblings stand up to their destructively alcoholic father and beg their mother to function and get them food. The mother, in fact, has a teaching degree, but she can rarely drag herself into employability. Although the various rural areas where they live are always desperate for a qualified teacher, the mother cannot tolerate work and she only occasionally holds a job, with the help of her children who lift her out of bed.
Mom’s infrequent paychecks rarely go to her kids’ noisy bellies. Rex will invariably claim his wife’s salary from him and set out to squander it.
This desperate state continues for years as the children of Walls sleep in cardboard boxes instead of beds, endure heated fights between their parents, and eat whatever they can find. Their mother teaches them to swallow spoiled food by holding their nose.
But even in the midst of these horrors of poverty and alcoholism, Jeannette Walls expresses genuine love within her family. They are loyal to each other, and Rex, in his sober moments, is wise, encouraging, and tender with his children.
In his memoir, Walls brilliantly elaborates on his experiences so that we can see the transformation of consciousness that takes place as he grows older. As a child, she does not criticize her parents. She loves them and doesn’t realize how terribly private her life is. But as she and her siblings mature, they definitely realize that her parents’ shortcomings are not acceptable.
Jeannette’s teenage years are spent in West Virginia, where her father retires to his hometown after going completely bankrupt in Arizona. Life for the Walls in West Virginia is terrifying as they occupy a shack at “93 Little Hobart Street”. The roof leaks. The plumbing doesn’t work. The Walls family buries their garbage and sewage in small holes that they dig. They hardly ever have food. Jeannette stops by the high school pulling leftover sandwiches out of the trash, and Rex plays the part of the town drunk. As misery defines their lives, Jeannette’s mother does the most infuriating things. When Jeannette and her brother find a diamond ring, they immediately want to sell it to eat, but her mother keeps it to “improve her self-esteem.” And so they continue to starve.
As Jeannette Walls tells the story of her shameful upbringing, you’ll admire her perseverance and that of her siblings. The Walls children finally take charge of their own lives and support each other in leading normal adult lives in a beautiful display of sibling closeness.
Every page of “The Glass Castle” will amaze you with the shameless and selfish actions of parents who can’t and won’t even try to take care of their children or themselves. Despite his terrible parents, Walls rarely reprimands them with his writings. His love for his parents is often manifested in painful dismay.
Much more happens throughout this amazing memoir than has been mentioned here. “The Glass Castle” is fascinating and an impossible book to put down. It is truly a masterpiece of storytelling and far superior to the typical bestseller.