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.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
The defining poverty memoir comparison — both are unsentimental accounts of chaotic childhoods, but McCourt performs the tragedy where Walls reports it
The Liar's Club
Mary Karr
A Texas childhood as chaotic as the Wallses', with a mother whose damage is harder to contain — more literary, more furious, equally essential
Educated
Tara Westover
The most direct spiritual descendant — a daughter escaping an eccentric, self-sufficient, destructive family through education, written with similar restraint
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff
A chaotic boyhood with an abusive stepfather — another memoir that refuses the easy victim posture
The Color of Water
James McBride
A son's reckoning with a complicated parent — different in race and geography, similar in its refusal to simplify the parent being examined
Half Broke Horses
Jeannette Walls
Rose Mary Walls's own mother's story, written by Jeannette as a 'true-life novel' — the prequel that contextualizes everything Rose Mary became