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What it argues
The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls's memoir about growing up as the second of four children in a family that moved constantly across the American Southwest and West Virginia, rarely had enough to eat, and existed almost entirely outside conventional institutions. Her father Rex was brilliant, charming, and alcoholic — a man who could explain the stars and plan impossible engineering projects but couldn't hold a job or stop drinking. Her mother Rose Mary was an artist who valued creative freedom over the obligations of feeding children. The title refers to Rex's lifelong promise to build his family a spectacular glass house powered by solar energy, a promise he never came close to keeping.
Walls tells the story in plain, unguarded prose that trusts readers to draw their own conclusions. She doesn't editorialize heavily about her parents. She describes the family digging through dumpsters for food, children sleeping in cardboard boxes for warmth, her father spending grocery money on alcohol, and her mother hoarding a chocolate bar while her children went hungry. She also describes him teaching her to swim by throwing her into a pool and her parents pointing out constellations on clear desert nights. The book holds both realities at once, which is what makes it work.
What it gets right
- 1.
Rex Walls was a gifted, charismatic man who could not subordinate his personal freedom and addictions to the needs of his children. The book makes no attempt to resolve this contradiction.
- 2.
Walls's childhood produced real competence. Scrounging for food, navigating unstable environments, and solving problems without adult help gave the children skills that proved useful later — at a steep cost.
- 3.
Rose Mary Walls treated motherhood as a constraint on her artistic identity. Her refusal to use a teaching salary to feed her children is the memoir's hardest scene to rationalize.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jeannette Walls grew up in a peripatetic family across the American Southwest and West Virginia before making her way to New York City, where she worked as a gossip journalist and columnist for New York magazine and MSNBC. The Glass Castle, published in 2005, spent more than a decade on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over five million copies in the United States. Walls also wrote the novel Half Broke Horses (2009), based on her maternal grandmother's life, and The Silver Star (2013). She lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.
