The Glass Castle: A Memoir
by Jeannette Walls
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeannette WallsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-09
ISBN: 074324754X
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Scribner
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- Condition: USED - Very Good
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Book Reviews of The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Book Review: Welch, dreamers, reality....
Summary: 4 Stars
This book left me thinking for days... for many reasons. I grew up on the other side of the tracks (the shiny side), also in southern West Virginia... that is, my family was middle class and living in the county adjacent to Walls', near the town of Bluefield. Economically, my life as a child (I was born in the early 1970's, when the action in Welch takes place in the book) was soft, comfortable, etc. etc. As a child, we traveled to Welch many times to visit friends (also white collar folks); my father was also born in the same county (McDowell) and would be about the same age as Rex Walls; my grandfather and uncle both mined coal near Welch; I am pretty sure our friend's daughter went to school with the Walls' kids. Like Jeannette, I also went to Barnard College -- some twelve years after her.
A friend recommended this book. I usually literally run for the hills when faced with anything that paints W. Virginians as crazy hillbillies, as I have found, crazy hillbillies exist at the top of society (and use money to get their way and enrich themselves) and put themselves uselessly on display (a la certain famous people now) just as much as they exist at the bottom of society. Appalachians are so often used by outsiders as scapegoats -- as modern day boogiemen. For example, at Barnard I was shocked to learn of rich girls there having been abused by their rich parents; wealth and region do not buy one sanity nor make one foolproof to dishing out or receiving abuse. Being eccentric, abusive, self-absorbed, alcoholic, neglectful, or incestuous are not Appalachian traits; they are human traits, unfortunately, at all levels of society. That said, poverty does breed poverty, whether that poverty be poverty of soul or of pocket. Thus, I faced Walls' book with much skepticism. I still have some, but despite all, this book sort of has inhabited me the last few days; I came to this forum curious to see what other people made of it.
A friend of mine who suffered direct, hideous abuse at the hands of her parents, we often have discussed why it is that she turned out okay, that is, getting a Ph.D., having a life, while her younger sister did not do very well. Although I don't believe in biological determination, we always come back to maybe some sort of in-born resilience, or of having had tenderness and connection and intimacy at the right moments, when her sister had not.
Dunno.
Although while reading The Glass Castle I found myself agreeing with Walls' parents' ideas [intellectual pursuit, anti-materialism, self-reliance, play, music, art, science, adventure, taking responsibility for oneself, family sticking together, loving their children, not cutting down their children's intellect, being proud of their kids, not abandoning their children to the hands of other people (Want to imagine a worse fate for them? Imagine from the time they were small, they had been left with Erma for her to raise.), keeping the family together, etc.] while heavily disagreeing with how they put them into practice (no adult supervision, starvation, self-centeredness, substance abuse, caprice, filth, dangerous living conditions, allowing predators near their kids, etc). The book (and their lives) clearly would have been different if the parents had also practiced what they preached in terms of self-reliance and self-sacrifice. In many ways, the four children became the products of their parents' ideas: they put into practice what their parents could not -- a classic case of do as I say, not as I do.
My friend asked how was it that the first three kids had so much drive? Well, Rex also must have had quite a bit of drive to escape his hellish household (his brother didn't), a household emotionally bereft and directly emotionally and physically abusive. I mean, it sounds crazy to say, but he did a lot better in his own way by his own kids than his mother did by him, and if it sounds possible, sounds like his abusive mom did better by him than her family had by her. My guess is he had lived in his head his whole childhood...dreaming of some magical time in the future when things would be better kept him alive... and that added to substance abuse -- those were his downfalls. I was able to wrap my head much more around why Rex was the way he was than I could make sense of the mom. We all have seen the dreamer alcoholic go to pot and take everything and everyone close to him with him. Winston Churchill claimed there was nothing more destructive than unrealized ambition and Rex Walls was a case in point. Thank god the first three kids had some of his more sober years and his attention during that time.
Now, like other readers, I just don't know what to make of the mother. We know a lot more about why Rex turned out the way he did than why the mother was as she was (is as she is). According to Jungian psychological theory, we seek out partners just about as healthy or as screwed up emotionally as we are. I think we can only infer from how awful Rex's family was, the mother's family must not have been any peachy ride in the park either. Basically, she was from a very well-to-do family, and having been raised with money did not make her any healthier emotionally. The theory that positive emotional involvement is the single most important thing in a child's life seems to me to be true (okay, obviously I am not the only one to think this); from how the mom turned out [self-absorbed, ineffective, semi-manic-depressive, out-of-touch with reality, able to rationalize and normalize almost any type of anti-social behavior (she hated the gov't, but loved the Church??), self-defeating, deceptive, stubborn] I can only guess she also had a miserable childhood. She, too, escaped to the world of dreams, into delusions of grandeur. Both she and Rex had visions of themselves as successful, famous, admired... they just had no social skills or reality checks about how to get there. They did not want to play by, or even knew how to play by, any of society's rules. Yet, even though they disparaged the value of success by society's standards, they both wanted it. They wanted it the way it had always come to them in their dreams -- overnight, magically, gloriously, without direct day-to-day effort, only on their own terms, without compromise or social negotiation.
What I am left thinking, after writing all the above, is how emotionally dire circumstances leave people with neither the social nor emotional skills to mitigate life's problems or challenges. Both of the parents had easier physical childhoods than they gave their own children; yet, by the descriptions of their parents and by how their lives turned out, it seems like they were raised by wolves (maybe wolves had more sympathy for their own young than the parents had gotten from their own folks). In turn, the parents took on the sort of typical gender roles for precocious yet emotionally neglected kids: the father exploded while the mother imploded. They became dreamers that could never touch earth; they were the centers of their own universes.
They were as emotionally present, I guess, as they could be for their own children. Maybe that is why the kids grew up and got on with their lives. What do I know? Certainly the dire physical circumstances in which the parents placed their own children did not afford the kids the luxury of becoming dreamers... they had to act and act immediately if they wanted to eat or if they needed protection. The Walls' kids, at least the first three, certainly got from their parents the kind of training needed for the kind of world their parents taught them the world was: dog eat dog.
I have met hundreds of people in my life that suffered no physical neglect at all, but have turned out to handle life a lot less adeptly than any of the Walls' children seem to be able to. Truly, I don't know what to make of that.
In short, I guess I don't know what to make of this book. I am not a person to throw stones... yet, I am also a person not afraid to call something for what it is. This book, and the Walls' kids lives, seem to exist just in that territory: the dream of what is possible and the difficulty of what is. Their lives and how they lived them, in every respect, certainly are food for thought. This book, I think, will leaving me thinking for a long time.
Summary of The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.
Q: How long did it take you to write The Glass Castle and what was that process like?
A: Writing about myself, and about intensely personal and potentially embarrassing experiences, was unlike anything I?d done before. Over the last 25 years, I wrote many versions of this memoir -- sometimes pounding out 220 pages in a single weekend. But I always threw out the pages. At one point I tried to fictionalize it, but that didn't work either.
When I was finally ready, I wrote it entirely on the weekends, getting to my desk by 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and continuing until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. I wrote the first draft in about six weeks -- but then I spent three or four years rewriting it. My husband, John Taylor, who is also a writer, observed all this approvingly and quoted John Fowles, who said that a book should be like a child: conceived in passion and reared with care.
Q: How did you decide to follow The Glass Castle with Half Broke Horses?
A: It was completely at the suggestion of readers. So many people kept saying the next book should be about my mother. Readers understood my father's recklessness because they understood alcoholism, but Mom was a mystery to them. Why, they would ask, would someone with the resources to lead a normal life choose the existence that she did?
I would tell them a little bit about my mother?s childhood. She not only knew that she could survive without indoor plumbing, but that was the ideal period of her life, a time that she tries to recreate. I think that for memoir readers, it's not about a freak show? they?re just looking to understand people and get into a life that?s not their own. I thought, let me give it a shot, let me ask Mom. And she was all for it. But she kept insisting that the book should really be about her mother. At first I resisted because my grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, died when I was eight years old, more than 40 years ago. But I have a very vivid memory of this tough, leathery woman; she sang, she danced, she shot guns, she?d play honky tonk piano. I was always captivated by her. Lily had told such compelling stories?I was stunned by the number of anecdotes, and that Mom knew so much detail about them. Half Broke Horses is a compilation of family stories, stitched together with gaps filled in. They're the sort of tales that pretty much everyone has heard from their parents or grandparents. I realized that in telling Lily's story, I could also explain Mom's.
Q: Why did you decide to write Half Broke Horses in the first person, and how much of this "true-life novel" is fiction?
A: I set out to write a biography of Lily, but sometimes books take on a life of their own. I told it in first person because I wanted to capture Lily?s voice. I?m a lot like my grandmother, so it came easily to me. I planned to go back and change it from first person to third person and put in qualifiers so the book would be historically accurate, but when I showed it to my agent and publisher, they both said to leave it as it is. By doing that, I crossed the line from nonfiction into fiction. But when I call it fiction it?s not because I tarted it up and tried to embellish things, but wanted to make it more readable, fluid, and immediate. I was trying to get as close to the truth as I could.
Q: How has your relationship with your mother changed in recent years?
A: Several years ago, the abandoned building on New York?s Lower East Side where Mom had been squatting for more than a decade caught fire and she was back on the streets again at age 72. I begged her to come live with me. She said Virginia was too boring, and besides, she's not a freeloader. I told her we could really use help with the horses, and she said she'd be right there. I get along great with Mom now. She's a hoot. She's always upbeat, and has a very different take on life than most people. She's a lot of fun to be around -- as long as you're not looking for her to take care of you. She doesn?t live in the house with us-- I have not reached that level of understanding and compassion-- but in an outbuilding about a hundred yards away. Mom is great with the animals, loves to sing and dance and ride horses, and is still painting like a fiend.
Q: What do you hope readers will gain from reading your books?
A:Since writing The Glass Castle, so many people have said to me, "Oh, you?re so strong and you?re so resilient, and I couldn?t do what you did." That?s very flattering, but it?s nonsense. Of course they?re as strong as I am. I just had the great fortune of having been tested. If we look at our ancestry, we all come from tough roots. And one of the ways to discover our toughness and our resiliency is to look back at where we come from. I hope people who read The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses will come away with that. You know, "Gosh, I come from hearty stock. Maybe I?m tougher than I realize."
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