Will I love The Glass Castle?

Walls’ recounts her unconventional childhood marked by poverty, instability, and the eccentric choices of her parents.

The memoir offers an unflinching but often tender portrait of a deeply flawed family and the complicated bonds of love and loyalty. Walls’s voice is both clear-eyed and compassionate as she revisits her past.

Wanting to make sense of my own dysfunctional family, I reread this book several times.

While most of the action doesn’t take place in NY, key scenes do and those are generally heartbreaking and speak to a city that allows for new beginnings and fresh starts for all, as well as a place that can swallow you whole.

Written about streets and squats I knew, the sentimental aspect was off the charts for me. But even without that connection, Jeannette’s writing is so moving that it will bring you emotionally into a unique, often hidden world. 

Jeannette Walls’ mother (and mine) had mental issues; our fathers both were alcoholics. Similarities like these in our destinies struck me, and all this despite her growing up in the US and me growing up in Russia. Some things are just universal. With that, reading and writing memoirs is very therapeutic.

By identifying with this book (and a dozen similar memoirs), I was able to reflect on my own family dynamics and understand my childhood, my bravery, and my struggles for stability. I like to think that, like Mrs. Walls, I was able to find strength through adversity and become… show more.

I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.

Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life. 

This memoir took me into a life that was not my own and yet was brimming with countless sights and sounds I knew deep in my bones. Walls speaks with vivid lyricism and unmistakable love for both of her dysfunctional parents throughout a childhood of vagabond-like chaos. (The title is derived from the imaginative but unfulfilled promise of an alcoholic father.)

Though the resilient author eventually makes a name for herself as a writer in New York, an encounter with her mother, now homeless on a city street, serves as the impetus for the earnest examination of their family history,… show more.

This is quite possibly my favourite memoir ever written. It made me laugh, cry and scream. Never have I seen such a clearly dysfunctional family that didn’t even realize they were dysfunctional.

I loved them because they embraced life no matter what and hated them because they didn’t see how bad what they were doing to one another was. Full of elements and emotions from my own childhood, this book made me feel deeply and emotionally.  

The fact that this book is a memoir makes it more amazing than a work of fiction.

The writer, Jeannette Walls, has so much more at stake in this story because it’s about her family, her childhood, and her parents. Her life. I raced through the book, from the first page, with my mouth open in almost disbelief because the level of neglect that Jeannette’s parents floated around in was astounding.

The story of childhood should not be so suspenseful, but Jeannette tells her realities so casually; her experience was truly like a frog in a pot of warming water,… show more.

Reading this book left me shocked and heartbroken at how people can be oblivious to how their unconventional parenting and unstable lifestyle affect their children.

I saw firsthand how poverty and turmoil created fearful, insecure children, who like me, were afraid to create new relationships or bonds with outsiders, knowing like they did, that if I got too close, my family or circumstances would embarrass me. Like the protagonist, I had to settle for loneliness.

I saw that her parents weren’t bad, just flawed. A major revelation for me. I saw that I was not alone and that there were… show more.

Ok, this was a re-read. That just shows how amazing the story is. I only re-read books that are truly compelling and have great writing, and I’ve re-read this book three times. I first encountered Jeannette Walls at a writing conference.

I thought: “If she can write as well as she speaks, I’m in.” She does. I love books with excellent writing and not-to-be-forgotten stories.

Since I read so many books a year, only the best ones rise to the top of my memory. I can remember exact scenes from Jeannette’s book year after year.

I love this book because, although it tells a difficult story of growing up in extreme poverty in rural America, it is written in prose that is sparing and unsentimental.

It is clear that – like me – Jeannette was desperate to love her parents, Rex and Rose Mary, despite their failings, but found this increasingly difficult as she became older and more conscious of the differences between her life and the lives of other children.

In the end, again like me, Jeanette had to run away from her parents to create a more stable and caring future.