Book Review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Scribner
288 Pages
Copyright 2005

There are books that reach out and grab you. They do so for a variety of reasons, as we all know. Beautiful language. Amazing characters. A plot that makes you laugh or cry or simply feel good about yourself and life. I’ve read books that have contained all those things. I’ve laughed more than I’ve cried but I have cried too. It’s one of the reasons I love to read. The possibilities are endless and I usually wind up reading a book or two that stays with me for a long time after I’ve put it away.

The Glass Castle is one of those books. I haven’t been able to get it completely out of my mind since I finished it Friday night. I found myself reading it at times like it was a work of fiction... but then I’d remember it wasn’t fiction and the true magnitude of what I was reading would hit me all over again.

Jeannette Walls grew up the child of an alcoholic father and a mother who clearly had psychological issues. They lived a vagabond life, ‘doing the skedaddle’ in the middle of the night, usually on step ahead of the bill collectors or the law. When she was three, she suffered serious burns while cooking herself hotdogs, catching her dress on fire in the process. Her mother was too busy painting to be bothered with feeding her child and besides, children needed to learn to fend for themselves.

The Walls family, Rex (the father), Rose Mary (the mother), Lori, John, Jeannette, and Maureen led a life of privation and instability. There were times when they had no food in their house and resorted to pilfering food from the garbage cans at school, or, in one case, eating a stick of butter mixed with sugar. At other times, they would buy (or steal) whatever they could get for cheap. One time they ate green grapes for weeks. Another, it was a ham so large that they ate it until it grew maggoty and then Rose Mary would tell them to cut the outside part off because the inside part was still good.

After years of roaming around the southwest, the Walls family returned to the small town of Welch, West Virginia, Rex’s home. There the children meet their alcoholic grandmother, who may or may not have sexually abused their father. After a falling out with the grandmother, the family moves into a small house located high up on the mountainside where the steps were falling apart and the house would decay around them.

Here are some memorable quotes:

During one middle of the night ‘skedaddle’, Jeannette recounts having trouble controlling their cat:

“Cats don’t like to travel,” Mom explained.

Anyone who didn’t like to travel wasn’t invited on our adventure, Dad said. He stopped the car, grabbed Quixote by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him out the window. Quixote landed with a screeching meow and a thud. Dad accelerated up the road.

“Don’t be so sentimental,” Mom said. She told me we could always get another cat, and now Quixote was going to be a wild cat, which was much more fun than being a house cat.

Later in the book, Jeannette recounts how she was afraid to complain because she was worried she would suffer the same fate as Quixote.

And:

When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase. The Glass Castle would have solar cells on the top that would catch the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity for heating and cooling and running all the appliances. It would even have its own water-purification system. Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans and most of the mathematical calculations. He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went; sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms.

With an alcoholic father, and a mother who didn’t believe in rules of any kind because her mother had been too strict, the Walls children grew up to be surprisingly normal and responsible. After graduation, Lori fled West Virginia for New York City. Jeannette and John followed soon after. Each became a responsible, functioning adult: Jeannette is a writer and recently gave up a job at MSNBC online. Lori worked as a comic book illustrator. John became a decorated detective with the NYPD. Maureen, after moving to NYC with her parents, finally made her escape to California.

Rex and Rose Mary eventually moved to New York City to be with their family. They ended up living on the streets for a time and then became squatters in an abandoned tenement. It was a lifestyle of choice and it continued until Rex died of cancer at the age of 54. The back of the book states that Rose Mary now lives on a guest house on the Virginia property of Jeannette and her second husband, author John Taylor.

The Glass Castle is the story of a dysfunctional family in the extreme. It was almost a horror story in a way and, when I was jarred by the knowledge that it wasn’t fiction, that it was a true story, I would wonder how the kids managed to fall through the cracks as completely as they had. Where were social services? Why didn’t they get help?

The answer was simple – Rex and Rose Mary didn’t want help. They preferred to do things on their own. Strangely enough, as horrible as their childhood was, it led to the children becoming the sort of adults who could handle anything. In a way, isn’t that the true test of parenthood?

Recommendation: What can I say? It’s an amazing story that will make you want to cry and make you want to laugh, too. Walls writes with a sort of detachment that somehow makes the story even more compelling. Give it a go and I’ll be willing to bet that you won’t forget the family any time soon.