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The Glass Castle: A Memoir (book)
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Original price was: $18.99.$9.99Current price is: $9.99.
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THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER—FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOON
The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.
The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
The Glass Castle is truly astonishing—a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.
The memoir was also made into a major motion picture from Lionsgate in 2017 starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts.
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Categories: Arts & Photography
Product name:
The Glass Castle: A Memoir (book)
Price:
Original price was: $18.99.$9.99Current price is: $9.99.
Mignon Wagner –
Touching story that will stick with you
Hannah –
Hannah Bauman
Dr Vogel
English 340
May 7th 2014
The Glass Castle
In the memoir, “The Glass Castle”, written by Jeannette Walls. She writes about her childhood, growing up with unorthodox and irresponsible, yet intelligent and talented parents. Moving from one city to another, living in a variety of environments, from a mobile home, to a motel at one point, to an abandon train depot, and then to a rundown miner’s house until her and her siblings moved to New York on their own finally. Their father, a man, who in some aspects could be mistaken for brilliant, is a belligerent drunk, can’t keep a job, and steals his children’s hard earned money, that they are saving to finance a new life in New York City and then spends it on booze. Then a mother who is an artist with a college degree, but refuses to act like an adult and get a job in order to take care of her children. Jeannette and her siblings have no choice, but to fend for themselves and find a way to get themselves out of this terrible dysfunctional environment.
For the children of this story growing up was full of unexpected adventures and struggles with consistent poor living conditions. The children would routinely go for days without eating anything, or when they did eat the meals consisted of very poor nutritional value. At one point Jeannette and her brother have to dig through the school garbage container for leftover food. This often led to the kids being bullied and/or ridiculed by their peers because of their social status and unkempt appearance. However, even with these misfortunes the children managed to excel in school. Despite their unfavorable situation, they were extremely resilient and somehow managed to find humor in their unfortunate predicament.
An example of the children’s resiliency is…one day, Jeannette being the resourceful girl she was, after a visit from a Child Protective Services, she went to the library and researched their options to get themselves out of this predicament. After many hours of research Jeannette came up with a solution. She ended up giving her mother an ultimatum; to leave her father or she needed to find a job and improve their living conditions. Jeannette stressed to her mother that they cannot keep on living like the way they had been. Although hesitantly, their mother decided to get a job as a teacher. However, it was short lived due to the mother being a terrible teacher and having childlike tendencies. The children often had to assist their mother with her duties as a teacher, grading school work and organizing papers. Additionally, to make matters worse, she even at times refused to get out of bed to go to work. This eventually led to the kids having to drag her out of bed in order to get her to work.
Jeannette and Lori, the older sister, finally got fed up with their mother’s behavior. They eventually made plans to go to New York, Lori planned to go first, following high school graduation, then, Jeannette would follow next when she finished High School. From this point on they both saved their hard earned money and put it into their piggy bank. Shortly before Lori graduated High School as they count the days until they could move out on their own and fend for themselves, Jeannette came home to find the piggy bank torn apart and all the money gone. They immediately confronted their father and of course he denied it. They were both devastated, but they stayed positive, put their heads together, and found another way to get to New York.
I enjoyed reading this book and it reminded me to be appreciative and be thankful for my upbringing and supportive family. I found it to be a page turner, very inspiring, couldn’t put it down. The children’s difficult childhood story is a true testament to resiliency. I would recommend this book to anyone in search of inspiration. This book included drama, adventure, humor, and redemption and kept me interested and attentive throughout. In the end…the children triumph over the struggles they encounter due to their irresponsible parents. However, in the end, their upbringing made them, but it didn’t break them. Their shared hardships only made their bonds stronger and together, they prospered with each other’s support.
T. Konvalinka –
I saw 20 minutes of the movie on TV one afternoon that was based upon this book and was intrigued by the subject matter. I knew I had to read the memoir, which sounded both unbelievable and profound.
I read the book in one sitting; I didn’t want to break my concentration. So many of the experiences of the family seemed both familiar yet foreign. While my upbringing was wildly different from that of the author, the core emotions felt at once relatable and unsettling. This book made me look at my own turbulent childhood with a new sensitivity and compassion.
I highly recommend this book to all; those who have a similar lived experience that want to understand how others have come to terms with it, as well as those who are looking from the outside, in.
Antonella –
Una storia bellissima che fa ridere e fa commuovere
jennifer b. –
I felt so sad for these kids. Although some of what’s written could have been from my own childhood, so I guess I also feel sad for myself. I’ve cried and laughed and enjoyed every sentence. Thankyou Jeanette Walls
Jackie –
Thank you so so much for sharing your story Jeanette. This is a book that will stay with me forever. You, your brother and both of sisters deserve a medal for the success you made of your lives. I felt so proud of you all by the end of the book. What an incredible story of love and survival.
Peter D. Mathews –
Life writing is not exactly my favorite genre, but this book was selected by my book club and so I dutifully read it. Two things surprised me about it: firstly, it was an incredibly fast read (I sped through the first hundred pages while juggling a million other things), and secondly, it was really well-written. The reason I avoid this genre is that most people’s life stories are written with an eye to provoking our emotions in the basest possible way. They manipulate us into feeling angry, or sympathetic, or inspired, but whatever the intended output, I almost always feel as though I’m being conned into feelings that are manufactured rather than natural.
The great strength of Walls’s account, by contrast, is that she shows remarkable restraint in telling this story without any of those emotional manipulations. Indeed, she goes out of her way to present the past through the eyes of her younger self, justifying the behavior of her parents in the same manner as she had done during the original experience. There can be no doubt that the Walls parents were abusive and neglectful, shifting the family from town to town in a spiral of increasing poverty and desperation. Juxtaposed to this, however, is the sense that they were also geniuses in their own way: their father Rex Walls repeatedly shows his skills in science, mathematics, and mechanics, while their mother Rose Mary is a seemingly talented but out-of-touch artist. Jeanette Walls does a remarkable job of showing these two starkly contrasting characters and how circumstances slowly swallow up their good qualities.
For most people, this book will hit all the right notes, but I wanted a little bit more in terms of pushing the limits of the genre. There are moments, for instance, where Walls wants to blur the line between literature and biography, such as the scene where her young self wants to replant a Joshua tree so that it will flourish:
“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. ‘You’d be destroying what makes it special,’ she said. ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.'”
In moments like these, I started to wish that Walls would push this strategy further by playing with her narrative voice a little, undermining its authority to some extent rather than building so insistently into the person she would become as an adult. There was no need to push such experimentation as far as, say, Chuck Barris’s
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography
, but it is the nature of subjective writing to account for the teller’s inherent biases and the unreliability of memory and I would have liked to see some acknowledgment of that fact.
Overall, however, I think this is a very well-written and interesting life story that mostly deserves the glowing accolades it has garnered so far.
Janet Elliott –
Well written, keeps your interest cover to cover.