First finished read of 2013! Woohoo!
This book was a Christmas gift from a friend in 2011. I picked it up a few times in 2012 but didn’t get very far, since it was kind of triggering for me. You may also find it so if you’ve experienced any kind of abuse or neglect in your childhood or if you are emotionally close to anyone who’s brilliant yet deeply self-destructive. However, from the fairly stable place I am in right now, it was well worth the read, one of those stories you can’t put down because it’s almost too crazy to be believed, but definitely too crazy to be made up.
Matter-of-factly, Walls tells the story of her childhood, starting with her first memory, which is of being in the hospital at three years old for severe burns requiring a skin graft. Her clothes had caught fire when she was preparing hot dogs – as she explains to the worried hospital staff, her mother says she’s very mature for her age and lets her cook for herself a lot. And this is the good part of the book; at least they have hot dogs to cook at this point. For most of The Glass Castle, Walls and her three siblings routinely lack food, heat, electricity, humane living conditions, and the list goes on. Walls’ parents are, in their own way, pretty brilliant: her dad is a whiz at physics and engineering, and her mom reads classic literature and paints prolifically. Yet Dad is also an alcoholic and Mom is a self-proclaimed “excitement addict,” and they run through jobs like Kleenex and seem to always have to leave town in the middle of the night. As Wells reveals early on in the book, her parents end up homeless in New York City, refusing all help, while Walls, grown up and a successful journalist, is living on Park Avenue.
Walls’ prose is heartwrenchingly honest but not self-indulgent; she masterfully describes the love for her parents that lives in tension with her anger at their neglect and their bad (sometimes jaw-droppingly bad) decisions, as well as her determination to create a better life than the one she’s known. Some might view this as the ultimate “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” story, but Walls shies away from overt politics for the most part. This is just one of those remarkable true stories, remarkably told.
It's My Pleasure Reading! 