“It’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.” I started to read Jeannette Walls the Glass Castle a couple months ago but had to put it down due to some scenes involving animal neglect. I finally got around to picking it back up and I’m glad I did. The Glass Castle is a hard read (not just because they abandon animals they pick up but can’t care for) but it’s thoroughly engrossing. Jeannette’s father, Rex, […]
“What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”
I read Jeannette Walls’s excellent memoir, The Glass Castle, a couple months ago. I can see where she borrowed from her (frankly, insane) childhood in The Silver Star, but this novel falls a bit short of her nonfiction. Set in the 1970s, The Silver Star is narrated by 12 year old Bean, whose mother has abandoned her and Bean’s 15 year old sister Liz in order to pursue her dreams of stardom (the mother seems to suffer greatly from something like manic depression). After a few weeks of eating pot […]
“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
Jeannette Walls grew up with three siblings, an alcoholic father who drank every dime he made, and an artistic mother who made it very clear to her children that she blamed them for her lack of success. They often moved in the middle of the night — to flee the FBI, according to her father — and spent years in hard poverty. Throughout it all, Jeannette and her siblings banded together to care for each other, and drag each out of the messes that their […]
I don’t do family drama. And guess what The Glass Castle is all about?
My book club is made up of a lot of non-fiction readers, so I’ve been reading more nonfiction than I normally do. Some books have been good, some not-so-great, but I’ve decided that memoir is overall not my genre. The Glass Castle, while one of the most startling nonfiction accounts I’ve ever read, was a tough book to read for lots of reasons. First, the story: Jeannette Walls grows up in an unconventional family. Her father is a megalomaniac and an alcoholic. Her mother is […]