60. the GLASS CASTLE

Jeannette Walls 2005

An unbelievable 'fact-is-stranger-than-fiction' memoir, the author who was a former journalist contributor to MSNBC.com, reveals her life growing up practically raised like nomads in the most dysfunctional family I have ever come across.

'I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster... To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City.'(3)

'I was on fire. It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew. I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress my grandmother had bought for me...I was wearing the dress to cook hot dogs, watching them swell and bob in the boiling water...'(9)

'We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the gestapo.'(19)

'By the time I was four, I was pretty good with Dad's pistol, a big black six-shot revolver, and could hit five our of six beer bottles at thirty paces.'(21)

'When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like building the Glass Castle. All of Dad's engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert.'(25)

'Mom didn't like cooking much--"Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?"--so once a week or so, she'd fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans.'(56)

'...Mom was assigned to teach Lori's class. Her students really liked her. She had the same philosophy about educating children that she had about rearing them. She thought rules and discipline held people back and felt that the best way to let children fulfill their potential was by providing them freedom.'(73)

'She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. "Everyone has something good about them," she said. "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that." (144)

'We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasions that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we'd get wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room... We quickly learned that whenever we ventured into the kitchen, we needed to wrap our hands in the driest socks or rags we could find.'(131)

'I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I thought Francie Nolan and I were practically identical, except that she had lived fifty years earlier in Brooklyn and her mother always kept the house clean. Francie Nolan's father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shitless drunk, maybe I wasn't a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.'(168)

'The road back to Welch was dark and empty. The wind whistled through the broken window on my side of the Plymouth. Dad lit a cigarette. "It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim." he said. "You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you'd do just fine."'(213)

'I didn't know what to do. Part of me wanted to do whatever I could to take care of Mom and Dad, and part of me just wanted to wash my hands of them.'(256)

'I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want.' (236)

'By the following summer, Mom and Dad were heading into their third year on the streets. They'd figured out how to make it work for them, and I gradually came around to accepting the notion that whether I like it or not, this was how it was going to be. "It's sort of the city's fault." Mom told me. "They make it too easy to be homeless. If it was really unbearable, we'd do something different."'(264)

Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too-- they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.'(270)

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2006
288 pages
Book borrowed from the Library