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The Glass Castle: a Memoir
Jeannette Walls

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Shoshana, December 21, 2007

Walls has given us an elegant memoir of growing up with difficult parents. When we first meet the family, though we as adult readers may experience some concern, Walls' child narrator sees only the adventure and excitement of her circumstances. Her father is a smart, charismatic eccentric; her mother, an artist from a privileged background who has renounced her own family's values and social class. Walls and her siblings adore and admire their parents (while already having some uneasy inklings that parents ought to protect their children more assiduously). As the narrator ages, her perspective on her parents shifts; it's also probably the case that their oddities became more pronounced. Her father's drinking and inability to manage the interpersonal aspects of a job become more prominent, while her mother withdraws farther from reality and responsibility. An especially grim section of the narrative takes place in West Virginia, where they appear to be the poorest of the poor in their community.

Walls is a good writer and the effort of reading this is emorional, not literary. I hope we'll see more from her. Read with Laura Love's You Ain't Got No Easter Clothes for another narrative about growing up with an unstable mother, and Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast for a fictional similar situation and developmental dynamic between father and child.

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