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.”
For Students
Because you will never read another sentence about a child cooking hot dogs and catching fire that is this matter-of-fact and this devastating. Because Walls proves you can write about terrible things without writing terribly. Because the question at the center — what do we owe the people who failed us, if we love them? — is one every person eventually has to answer. And because at 288 pages of plain prose, it reads in a weekend.
For Teachers
Ideal for teaching narrative voice, the ethics of memoir, and the relationship between style and meaning. The simplicity of Walls's prose is deceptive — every sentence is a choice, and those choices are teachable. The memoir also generates genuine argument: students consistently disagree about Rex and Rose Mary, which means it's doing its job.
Why It Still Matters
Every family has its glass castle — the beautiful plan that never gets built, the brilliant parent who drinks, the mother who loves the idea of children more than the practice of raising them. The memoir doesn't require a poverty childhood to resonate. It requires a family, and a past you're not sure what to do with. That's most people.