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The Glass Castle: A Memoir

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Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$15.00~~
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

1138 reviews
Sales Rank: 1051

Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8

ISBN: 074324754X
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.82092
EAN: 9780743247542
ASIN: 074324754X

Publication Date: January 9, 2006
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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
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

Product Description
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.

Customer Reviews: Read 1133 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

WHAT A COURAGEOUS MEMOIR - - BRAVO! February 28, 2005
andy behrman (los angeles)
551 out of 589 found this review helpful

First, "The Glass Castle" is a real page turner - - I couldn't put it down and finished it in about four hours - - a record for me!

It's probably the most thoughtful and sensitive memoir I can ever remember reading - - told with such grace, kindness and fabulous sense of humor.

It's probably the best account ever written of a dysfunctional family -- and it must have taken Walls so much courage to put pen to paper and recount the details of her rather bizarre childhood - - which although it's like none other and is so dramatic - - any reader will relate to it. Readers will find bits and pieces of their own parents in Rex and Rose Mary Walls.

Her journey across the country, ending up in a poor mining town in West Virginia and then finally in New York City, is a fascinating tale of survival.

Her zest for life, even when eating margarine and sugar and bundled in a cardboard box with sweaters, coats and huddling with her pets, is unbelievably beautiful - - and motivating.

If I could give a book ten stars, it would be "The Glass Castle."

5 out of 5 stars

Courage to move forward.... March 11, 2005
MovedbyMusic
278 out of 317 found this review helpful

Jeannette Walls is familiar as a face and voice for MSNBC.com. Her husband is writer John Taylor. Her parents were non conventional and non-conforming, and she was often left to take care for herself.

Through the book I kept looking for bitterness or residual shame just as the author often had to rummage for food in a dumpster but she is so contented and the book is her memoir of thriving and letting go of negative feelings. Her parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls and their four children had a bizarre existence, but Jeanette is testament to survival and functional achievement regardless of what type of spoon you're born with in your mouth. The spoon in her mouth may have been plastic but she turned her life into gold.

2 out of 5 stars

Many readers are missing the point of the book here... June 27, 2005
Laurel962 (Cleveland, Ohio)
218 out of 284 found this review helpful

While I deeply respect the right of other reviewers to disagree with my personal assessment of a book, I think what we have here is a bunch of people who barely read or skimmed "Glass Castle" for the highlights and have utterly missed the message of the book.

This is NOT a harrowing account of an impoverished family, ala "Angela's Ashes." The following is so important that I wish I could boldface it, or put stars around it:

Jeanette Wall's family was WEALTHY -- they were MILLIONAIRES. They were NOT poor....they were, however severely mentally ill.

I wish I could somehow emphasize that. Despite living in squalor and abusing their children, the Walls family had a great deal of inherited wealth -- money that was still around when Rose Mary Walls (the mother) was an older woman living as a squatter in a hovel in New York City. I believe a great deal of Rose Mary's "ditsiness", and her apalling insensitivity sprang from a priviledged life where she never had to deal with ordinary problems such as taking care of children, obtaining safe housing or clean food. This, combined with a severe mental illness and a husband who was lost early on to severe alcoholism, lead to the tragedies described in the book.

It is a little difficult to tell, therefore, how much of the book is factually true and how much of it is embellished by daughter Jeanette, who apparently escaped nearly unscathed by her experiences to a college education and immensely successful career. I don't believe that the entire story is fabricated, but I think there has been a certain amount of "creative license" employed here to make the story more dramatic.

One particular problem I have is that after the adult Jeanette becomes educated and wealthy (she lives on Park Avenue, and has a career as a society gossip columnist), she fails utterly to recognize her parents mental illness and incompetence to live an even minimally decent life. As an adult, I feel that Jeanette had a legal and moral responsiblity to have her parents declared incompetent, and use their multi-million dollar assetts to have them treated medically for their illnesses (probably some kind of psychosis for the mother, obviously severe alcoholism for her dad). There was no lack of funds, either in her parents extensive wealth or her own lavish Park Avenue existence -- it is terribly hard to believe that she just "allowed" them to live homeless on the streets for years (and still does).

I have a few other problems such as the fact that Jeanette describes being filthy and wearing rags as a child, yet her school pictures show a clean, well-dressed and apparently normal little girl. It does make me think that she has exaggerated things a bit -- perhaps because mental illness (which can be inherited) is so much scarier than just have parents who are "hippies" or "colorful" or simply incompetent at living a normal life.

Still and all, you cannot evaluate this memoir properly unless you acknowledge the above FACTS...to describe this as a book about a child surviving poverty is so incorrect as to render the book meaningless.

5 out of 5 stars

Inferno to Paradiso (or close enough) December 14, 2005
Thomas M. Seay (Palo Alto, California USA)
161 out of 173 found this review helpful

Jeannette Wall's trek, as depicted in "Glass Castle", recalls Dante's
journey through Hell and eventual ascenscion to Paradise. The comparison may seem risibly over-dramatic, but just as Dante had to go through the experience of the Netherworlds before he could be led to Heaven, so, too, is Jeannette's eventual triumph the FRUIT of a childhood filled with poverty and, what some would call, parental neglect or even abuse.

In the opening section about Jeannette's early childhood, sort of the outer rungs of hell, we are introduced to the author's quirky family. Her father, Rex, is a brainy underachiever who cannot keep a job and has a bit of a "drinking situation".
The mother is an eccentric artist who cannot be bothered too much
by mundane tasks- you know, like cooking or cleaning the house. The children, all extremely bright, are often underfed and left to fend for themselves. However, if the parents have failings, they also have redeeming qualities. The children are immersed in an environment that values art, music, intellectual pursuits, freedom and self-sufficiency and spurns racism and all forms of bourgeois superficiality. Above all, the reader never doubts that Rex and his wife truly love the children. One gets the feeling throughout that Jeanette never doubts that either.
In any case, the early years are bittersweet. If there is squalor and hunger there is also humor and magic. Most of all, there is hope. The family frequently moves and, although that is frustrating, it also provided the background for a myth: that the next town would provide prosperity.

But then to Welch they did go! And, it is in this West Virginia town where her father grew up,the "Nation's Coal Bin", that Jeannette and the rest of the family descend into the lower regions of hell. All the problems are exacerbated. The father, having returned to the place he said he never would, drinks with abandon and applies more and more of the family's slim resources toward his habit. Jeanette resorts to scaveging trash barrels for sustenance and is humiliated for her tattered clothing. There is not water in the house for bathing and no heat in Winter. Swallowed by the appalachian mountains with only the two-lane US 52 out, you feel stuck. Even the pilgrim parents are unable to muster the strength to break the gravity of this place. With this immobility came the final destruction of the myth (that the family would move somewhere else and find prosperity) and, as a consequence, the destruction of hope. However, it is in this darkness that Jeannette finds her calling. She becomes a reporter for the "Maroon Wave", the Welch High School student newspaper. The rest of the book details how her dream to become a "high falutin" journalist led her to New York City and her current incarnation. Maybe not Paradiso, but close enough considering her formative years.

A number of components conflate to push Jeannette towards a succeful resolution. Certainly the positive legacy of her parents: culture, books, self-sufficiency, etc. But also the dire situation gave her a sense of urgency and the focus that comes with it: She had nothing to lose. She was lucky enough to have discovered early on a career path and did not have the leisure to ruminate ENDLESSLY on it.. This latter often brings self-doubts that paralyze youth. Unlike so many memoirs about unhappy childhoods, the author never plays the John Bradshaw card by irately denouncing her parents, nor does she try to facilely excuse them. Life is more complex than that and she understand that syzygys cannot be tampered with, lest you destroy the whole. You cant take eggs out of the cake.

On a personal note, I grew up in Welch, went to Welch High School and knew Jeannette (though not very well) who was two grades behind me. I have not seen her since High School. For those reviewers who expressed doubts about the authenticity of her story, I can tell you that at least the Welch part of the story rings true to my memory.

2 out of 5 stars

The Horrific Childhood but I'm Okay memoir. November 2, 2005
minty
40 out of 50 found this review helpful

I cringe to hear descriptions of Walls' parents as "eccentric."
The apt term is criminally negligent, and you can't help but wonder what Walls wants us to feel about them after relating the chaotic childhood that she and her siblings barely survive. Her alcoholic father was supposedly "brilliant" yet he never appears in these pages as anything other than a garden variety lush. He steals money from his kids to drink, disappears for days, takes his 13-year-old daughter to a bar to lure pool pigeons. An alkie is an alkie, and any insightful person tries very hard to understand that there is nothing distinguished about them. Her mother sounds bipolar, but in any case is relentlessly childish, selfish, and neglectful, never even registering that her kids are hungry although there is no food in the refrigerator for days. Eccentric mom is perfectly capable of getting a good job teaching, but this is beneath her. Walls almost dies on more than one occasion because mummy dearest is painting....(pictures, not walls). Yeah, these two are so endearingly quirky, aren't they. The title of this memoir refers to the dream house and engineering marvel that her father is going to build for them. When the kids finally try, in desperation, to manifest this promised fantasy by digging a hole for the foundation, her parents quickly fill it up with garbage. They subsequently become known in the small town where they live as the kids "who live in garbage."

Abused and neglected kids can be forgiven for wanting to weave a narrative from their traumatic experience. What is troubling about this memoir is that Walls seems to cling so tenaciously to her story of how Daddy loved her so much, and so specially, and how her parent's selfish neglect included a self-serving spin on how they should turn adversity into triumph. She never comes close to acknowledging what it feels like to confront the fact that dad loved something else a whole lot more than he loved her. In fact, we learn little of Walls' experiences as an adult struggling to process what it really means to live with her parent's garbage. She seems to have emerged unscathed, other than suffering pangs of embarassment over her mother's dumpster diving. Her younger sister appears not to have been so sturdy or fortunate, but Walls glosses over this sad fact.

Maybe in another book.....

a must read book club dysfunctional family memoir must read

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