Jeannette Walls proves in her astounding memoir that bad upbringing 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 draws you in with an opening scene in which Walls, now an adult in New York City, looks out the window of his taxi to see his mother rummaging through a dumpster. Her mother is homeless, one of those drifters we all see, but now you suddenly 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 hot dogs on the stove. There is a long stay at the local hospital near where her family currently lives in Arizona while Walls recovers. To the hospital staff, the parental neglect is obvious, but Jeannette doesn’t associate the disapproving murmurs around her with her parents.
If any action by social services is planned, we never find out because his father, Rex Walls, plans an early release from the hospital in his trademark “Rex Walls style.” This means that he will take his little girl and skip the hospital bill that he has no intention and no way of paying.
Jeannette is taken with her father, her mother, her older sister and her younger brother and the family sets off. It begins just one of many trips in which the Walls family ends up in ramshackle 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 build one day. He often reassures his children with the promise of this fantasy dwelling. It’s 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 gifted, but his earnings are inevitably wiped out in flash floods of alcohol that leave his family perpetually destitute.
In an immersive narrative that plunges you deeper into an almost unimaginable existence of deprivation, we see Jeannette and her siblings confront their destructively alcoholic father and beg their mother to work and get them food. The mother does, in fact, have 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 the work and she only occasionally keeps a job, with the help of her children who get her out of bed.
Mom’s infrequent paychecks seldom end up in her children’s noisy tummies. Rex will invariably claim his wife’s salary and set out to squander it.
This desperate state continues for years as the Walls children sleep in cardboard boxes instead of beds, endure scalding fights between their parents, and eat whatever they can find. Their mother teaches them to swallow spoiled food by holding their noses.
But even in the midst of these horrors of poverty and alcoholism, Jeannette Walls expresses the 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 memoirs, Walls brilliantly elaborates on his experiences so that we can see the transformation of consciousness that takes place as it grows. As a child, she doesn’t 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 parent’s shortcomings are not acceptable.
Jeannette’s teenage years are spent in West Virginia, where her father retires to his hometown after going completely broke 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 trash and sewage in small holes that they dig. They almost never have food. Jeannette stops by the high school picking leftover sandwiches out of the trash, and Rex fills the role of the town drunk. As misery defines their lives, Jeannette’s mother does the most exasperating things. When Jeannette and her brother find a diamond ring, they immediately want to sell it for food, but her mother keeps it to “boost her self-esteem” for her. 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 berates them with his writing. His love for his parents often manifests itself in painful dismay.
Throughout these amazing memoirs there is much more going on than what 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.