The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls (2005)
“A woman watches her parents dumpster-dive from a Manhattan taxi and realizes she has spent her whole life ashamed of the people who made her.”
At a Glance
Jeannette Walls grew up in a family of nomadic, brilliant misfits led by her charismatic, alcoholic father Rex and her self-absorbed artist mother Rose Mary. She and her siblings spent their childhoods in poverty across the American Southwest and Appalachia, moving constantly to evade creditors and reality. Despite neglect, hunger, and danger, Jeannette put herself through school and became a journalist in New York. The memoir opens with an adult Jeannette spotting her homeless mother rummaging through a dumpster in Manhattan — and asking herself why she is ashamed.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
One of the best-selling memoirs of the 21st century, spending over five years on the New York Times bestseller list. It revitalized the literary memoir as a genre and sparked widespread public debate about what children owe their parents, what parents owe their children, and whether poverty memoirs romanticize or accurately report their subjects. It also prompted serious ethical discussion about memoir as form: how much can an author shape family members' lives without their full consent?
Diction Profile
Conversational and precise — Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, short declarative sentences, almost no metaphor. Walls writes like a journalist who has decided to tell the truth about herself.
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