Celebrating a hair over 20 years since its release, the 2005 gritty and pretty memoir “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is as vividly alive as ever.
I have been reading this book for weeks — not because the pace is slow but because my life is fast.
Designated as my tote bag read, it was the hardcover I would crack open when I was out and about.
I would read it whenever I had idle time, like sitting at a waiting room or in-between meetings. It felt like I was being invited to continue my conversation with an old friend. The story slept whenever I closed it and revived itself each time I picked it up.
Walls is a gifted wordsmith, intricately piercing and piecing together the shattered fragments of her somewhat fantastical and impoverished childhood. It almost feels too bad to be true. And yet it seems to be just so.
She goes back in time to introduce us to her charming adventurer father who escaped into a bottle more than he took to the office, leaving the family to get by with literal scraps, constantly moving in states of chaos in search of imaginary gold and a quest to not be entrapped in a capitalistic society.
Her mother, another wanderer, would often say, “Why should I cook a meal that will be gone in an hour when I can do a painting that will last forever?”
This left Walls and her young siblings starving, for food, for normalcy, for peace.
Imagine having that kind of structure as a young person — knowing that the adults who are meant to protect you and provide you shelter are just flat out incapable. Her parents were not malicious but they were negligent. She loved them deeply but they hurt her deeper.
Sadly, this is a reality many Americans like Walls face even today. And many others around the world. This story is how she yanked herself out of it.
You do not have to have grown up poor to understand. The narrative is ripe with emotion that can be relatable no matter your personal circumstance.
The main takeaway, for me, was that we can turn things around. Most of us cannot choose our childhoods or pick our families but we can decide to remove ourselves from toxic situations and spaces. Love, which she had an abundance of in her family’s various makeshift dwellings, was not enough to sustain her. You cannot change others, no matter how much you love them.
The “Glass Castle” of the title was a bond between father and daughter. He assured her that he would build one for her but like all his promises it failed to materialize. But it also did, because she made her own.
I savored every last page and now need to find a new tote bag read.
