This past weekend I read Jeannette Walls wonderful memoir The Glass Castle. I pretty much stayed in bed Saturday and Sunday reading this amazing book. I just couldn’t put it down!!
The memoir goes through the childhood, teenage, and early adult years of Jeannette Walls. With a free-spirit artist mother, Rose Mary, and a big-thinking alcoholic father, Rex, the Walls family traveled for much of her early childhood. Jeannette, along with her older sister Lori, younger brother Brian, and little sister Maureen endure neglect, hunger, and abuse on a regular basis to the point where they believed they have a normal childhood and are the lucky ones. They would “scaddadle” every few months from a different town out in the California or Nevada deserts after money got tight and Rex Walls lost his job. The parents would spin it each time as an adventure that the children more than happily partook in. Eventually the settled in Phoenix, in the home that her mother inherited from her mother, for some time but the stability was only temporary.
Once again Rex loses his job in Phoenix, the family moves to Welch, West Virgina, where Rex is from. In Welch, times are even harder. During her teenage years, Jeannette works hard in school but lived on the “other side of the tracks.” The little house her family finally finds to live in has no running water, no indoor plumbing, and seems to be falling apart. Eventually her life changes when two film makers from New York visit her school. She decides that the only way out of the life she’s been brought up in, is to move to New York.
Lori first moves to New York after she graduates high school and Jeannette follows her after her junior year. In New York, they find an apartment, jobs, and live the city life but in their absence life for Brian and Maureen become even more unbearable so they too move to the city. Once all the children are together, Rex and Rose Mary soon arrive as well to a surprise to everyone else to “be a family”. Even though the parents stay with their children, they return to a life of poverty on the streets as homeless people.
The hardships and struggles the Wall children endure during their life due their parents are astonishing. Through it all, the children stood by each other and by their parents. One of the things Jeannette was able to do was accept her parents for who they were. They might not be the “best” parents in the world but at the end of day, they do love their children very much. I’m not saying love is all you need (Life really isn’t like The Beatles song.) but it does help. The language and voice Jeannette uses for the memoir is real, true, and sincere. You become so involved you forget it’s a memoir and think it’s a novel. You forget this is the first hand account of one individual.
The most important thing I took from this is that everyone has a story to tell. You will never know what a person has been through, their personal trials. But the story that each of us has, makes us who we are. If isn’t always how you expect it or how you want it to be but all you can do is take it one step at a time because it can always be worse.
