The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. Paperback 289 pages. Simon and Schuster. $9.99
Jeanette Walls: Jeannette Walls is an American author and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood. Published in 2005, it was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 421 weeks.
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a 2005 memoir. Walls recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father’s attempts toward redemption. Despite her family’s flaws, their love for each other and her unique perspective on life allowed her to create a successful life of her own, culminating in a career in journalism. The book’s title refers to her father’s ultimate unfulfilled promise, to build his dream home for the family: a glass castle.
In the end, The Glass Castle is a poignant exploration of family, resilience, and the enduring power of hope. Despite the hardships they faced, the Walls children managed to overcome their challenging beginnings and build successful lives for themselves.
In The Glass Castle, we are introduced to the author’s unconventional and tumultuous childhood. Jeanette and her siblings are raised by their eccentric and often neglectful parents. Her father, Rex, is intelligent with a passion for science and a disdain for authority, while her mother, Rose Mary, is an artist who is more interested in her work than in caring for her children.
Despite their parents’ shortcomings, Jeannette and her siblings learn to fend for themselves from a young age. They scavenge for food, move from place to place, and endure extreme poverty. Their father, an alcoholic, often fails to provide for the family, and their mother is too absorbed in her art to take on the role of a traditional caregiver. The children are left to navigate a chaotic and unstable existence, marked by frequent moves and periods of homelessness.
As the Walls children grow older, they begin to question their parents’ choices and the validity of their father’s promises.
Despite the challenges they face, the Walls children are determined to escape the cycle of poverty and dysfunction that has defined their upbringing. They each find their own ways to cope and survive.
The strength of this book is in the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family. Her memoir reminds us that all people have a story and a past. For those involved in childcare, whether house parents, teachers, administrators, directors or the board, some of the children in your agency could easily have similar backgrounds to Jeanette’s. Ultimately The Glass Castle reminds us of the hope, which we need to give to those in our agencies.