The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

I first read The Glass Castle soon after it was published in 2006, but as I wrote in my review for another of Walls' books, Half Broke Horses, my book group chose it for March. I loved Half Broke Horses so much that I decided to read The Glass Castle once again!

The story opens with Walls, aged 3, starting a kitchen fire and getting third-degree burns because she was cooking hot dogs and her dress caught fire. At age 3. Hospitalized for several weeks, her parents take her out of the hospital before she has fully healed and has been discharged. And she's right back to cooking hot dogs at the stove, because that's what her parents tell her to do.

Rose Mary Walls (Jeannette's mother) had been raised to be independent, but she took that to an entirely different level. Probably bipolar, Rose Mary wanted to spend all her time making art, not raising children. So the children had to raise themselves. They didn't get groceries for weeks at a time...because Jeannette's dad Rex drank away any money they had, and Rose Mary couldn't be bothered to find a way to feed the kids.

Nomads and rebels, Jeannette's parents took their kids all around the country, and they would flee towns in the middle of the night when her parents were unable to pay their debts. They slept in cardboard boxes and peed and pooped in a hole in the ground until it overflowed.

This book has so many shocking stories...it's unfathomable that her parents would think how they raised their children was okay...but alcoholism and mental illness will do that. All three of the Walls children got out as soon as they could.

Now Walls' mother lives on her property in Virginia (you can get a glimpse of her mom in this youtube video). She is a hoarder, to no one's surprise. Even though her parents provided very little stability in her life, it's clear that Jeannette had a deep, complicated love for both of them.