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.”
Short Summary
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.
Detailed Summary
The Glass Castle opens in New York City in 1989. Jeannette Walls is a successful Manhattan journalist riding in a taxi when she sees her mother digging through a dumpster. She sinks low in the seat, ashamed. That shame — its origins, its price, and ultimately its dissolution — is what the book is ab...