Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly.

Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict". Cooking a meal that would be consumed in 15 minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town - and the family - Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.

Listening Length

10 hours and 25 minutes
Author

Jeannette Walls
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Jeannette Walls
Audible release date

September 28, 2010
Language

English
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Simon & Schuster Audio
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B0044X4QEA
Version

Unabridged
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Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	10 hours and 25 minutes
Author	Jeannette Walls
Narrator	Jeannette Walls
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	September 28, 2010
Publisher	Simon & Schuster Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0044X4QEA
Best Sellers Rank	#1,607 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1 in Biographies of Journalists, Editors & Publishers #3 in Biographies of Authors #14 in Author Biographies

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Life with Mom and Dad was never boring.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 9, 2023

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Jeannette Walls' parents were hippies a couple of generations too soon. They were anti-government, anti-establishment nonconformists. Their children were loved in a general way, negligently cared for, and often ignored. Such a parenting style was necessary because Rex was a drunk, gambling or working very hard to avoid gainful employment and his wife was too involved in her art, her writing, or in her reading to make the slightest effort to feed her family or to make a home.

With four perennially hungry children in tow, they wandered the Southwest, living in one rat hole after another until they came under the scrutiny of authorities. Then they would abandon everything but Mom's paintings and take off in some unreliable junker which rarely got them anywhere worthwhile. It was when they retreated to West Virginia, to Rex's hometown, that hope and optimism faded for them all. The parents lost hope and the children were determined to escape the grinding poverty that made their family the most destitute in a declining Appalachian coal town, the only one refusing the lifeline Welfare offered.

This is a true American survival story of a couple who risked their children's lives by forcing them into a foolhardy gypsy existence that was completely unnecessary. It is also a survival story in the sense that the children only managed to survive by tearing themselves away from their family before it destroyed them.

I highly recommended The Glass Castle. It is fascinating, harrowing, and often hilarious, while making you realize how easily one's background can be so devastatingly different that it must be hidden. Read the first few paragraphs to see how Jeannette begins her story. Then think about your own and be grateful. KL

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Jeannette Walls writes about her experiences growing up poor. Her father

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 30, 2017

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Set equally in small desert towns and Welch, Virginia, Jeannette Walls writes about her experiences growing up poor. Her father, charismatic and intelligent, sees himself as a hero and rebel, when he is really a liar and unethical, alcoholic. Rose Mary Walls, her mother, has no concept of sacrificial love, ignoring her children’s needs while indulging herself throughout Jeannette’s life. The book, told in first person, testifies to the resilience of the Walls children. In spite of their parent’s neglect, Jeannette and her siblings support each other, ultimately escaping poverty. Jeannette becomes an award-winning author; her brother a police officer, and her older sister an illustrator. Apparently, the younger sister struggles with mental illness.
The most powerful element of this book is the theme of fire. Examples of the author’s use of fire include: the author catching herself on fire at three years old; the glow of her father’s cigarette as he told them stories at night; him smelling like smoke; the scary incident of a burning shack; the kids collecting coal and wood to have a fire for warmth. Bullies call her “Matchstick.” She explains how she likes the wooden matchsticks over books of matches because of the sound they make. Jeannette’s fascination with fire includes melting a toy Tinkerbell’s face. One incidence of playing with matches ends up burning down a motel. She watches the flames from across the street. Her sister is burned after using kerosene to light wet wood. Jennette believes her father’s claim that he is “working on a technology to burn coal more efficiently” (171). The author recalls her father showing her how to pass her finger through a candle flame. Her Dad triggers a fire which destroys their Christmas tree and presents beneath it. She even mentions her home with her first husband did not have a fireplace.
The most important quotes relate to this theme. Jeannette wonders if “fire had been out to get her” (34). As they watch the shimmering heat coming from a shack she and her brother set on fire, Jeannette’s father says, “…that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. It is a place where no rules apply or at least they haven’t figured ‘em out yet… You all got a little too close to it today” (61). This illustrates her entire life, living somewhere between turbulence and order. She has no stability, no food, no proper shoes. She is not clean. She is not protected from the elements, or from her enemies. She has reckless, foolish parents. At one point, her father instructs her to pet a cheetah. Even so, Jeannette learns to value herself, her siblings and learning. She pursues higher education. Though her parents are a mess; they teach her about: math, geology, desert survival, how to use weapons, reading and math. Sister Lori, learns how to draw and paint, but their parents do not teach their children about hygiene, nutrition, boundaries, or integrity. The final line of the novel connects back to the most important quote. The family gathers after Rex’s death. Jeannette watches candles burning. She says, “A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order” (288). The reader is reminded of her father and the theme of fire. Jeannette Walls lived her entire life in that zone, between turbulence and order, doing her best to figure out the rules.
The least likable person is Jeannette’s mother whom she presents as an optimistic, artistic, and carefree soul. Actually, she is a narcissistic hedonist, whose children should have been taken away from her. One reason a family exists is to provide for and protect the welfare of children. Mary Rose Walls, did neither. She did not feed, clean, clothe, shelter or supervise her children. She did not respond to their complaints of being fondled, by providing a secure environment or, by reporting or removing molesters, or bullies. Her selfishness is both sad and sort of disgusting. Infestations of flies, rats and roaches do not motivate her to sell valuable real estate, an expensive ring, or nice car. She buys art supplies and fantasizes about establishing herself as an artist. When she refuses to go to work. Her oldest daughter Lori prompts her by appealing to her love of fun and self. Lori says, “Teaching is rewarding and fun. You’ll grow to like it” (74). Though her kids are malnourished and hungry, Rose Mary refuses government aid but is caught sneakily eating a family sized chocolate bar. She never leaves her abusive, alcoholic husband because she is Catholic but she also admits “because she’s addicted to the excitement” (93). After her husband dies from a heart attack, she says, “Life with your father was never boring” (288). She says this as if it was the most important thing about him.
The book has been successful. It spent seven years on the New York Times Best
Sellers List. According to Simon and Schuster books, The Glass Castle won five awards:
ALA Alex Award; ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults; Eliot Rosewater HS Book Award(IN); Pennsylvania School Librarian Association “Top Ten (or so) Young Adult Books; and Virginia Reader’s Choice Award Master List. (“The Glass Castle.” )
The story is not without flaws. Jeannette relates events but fails to communicate the related emotions of growing up hungry, dirty, cold and powerless. What she does convey well is the power of hopefulness. For most of her life she thought her father would find gold and build the Glass Castle. She believed in him. When she realizes the ‘Glass Castle’ will never be built, she does not lose her optimism. Instead, her hope shifts to escaping life in Virginia.
The story is not about forgiveness. Jeannette Walls assumes she and her parents simply have different values. Where there is no guilt, there is no need for pardon. The denial of a problem rankles. It is not simply alternative values that fails to buy school clothes, shoes, and lunches. Good men do not avoid paying bills. They do not throw beloved pets from cars, repeatedly endanger and refuse medical care for their kids. Jeannette’s parents withheld valuable resources, sabotaged their children’s success and actively betrayed them. They did not simply have another set of beliefs. They were unfit, neglectful parents.
I do recommend the book. The author tells her story. She recounts what it is like to live “in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire” (34). Well-written, this book is a memorable read, but not a pleasant one.

13 people found this helpful

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artemis 1291

Love of Fate: Triumph of Meaning over Suffering

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 8, 2018

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Dickensian world of poverty is so abominably tenebrous that we tend to think of it simply as an anachronistic, if not antediluvian, work of fiction apropos of a bygone Victorian era, without translating its elemental essence of nobleness of human spirit that arises from predicaments into our own zeitgeist. The fictitious characters of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip are the embodiment of such resilience, phoenix-like spirits enduring sordid conditions that life could impose upon us to the extent possible. Spinoza, the Dutch thinker and watchmaker, once said that it is Amor fati, love of fate, by which man’s inner strength could raise him above his outward fate. In fact, Nietzsche centuries after corroborated by saying: “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.” Given the above axioms, what if someone in our contemporary time a fortiori lives to tell such victory of human spirit? That was the reason that I chose The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. All of the aforesaid noble triumph of human spirit over existential horrors of life is substantively and stoically recorded in this compelling living memoir with all her spirit, with all her intelligence, and with all her heart.

The story starts as Walls invites us to board her memory train and travel back in times until we return to where we depart along the long and winding railroads of her windy but beloved past. We meet her charismatic, intelligent father whose engineering feats are passed in smolder by his ever independent, anti-establishment, recalcitrant spirit a fortiori emboldened by a spirit of Dionysian portion. The artistically inclined mother is all liberality: She is a devout Catholic - although far from being sanctimonious - and has a heart of gold, save a practical sense of the world. Then there are one brother and two sisters, all of whom are highly intelligent and well-behaved thanks to the moral upbringing by their parents. The parents do not have the gumption to support their children, let alone themselves in terms of economic security, which was the cause of the existential ills of the family, pushing Walls into a position of a de facto breadwinner of the family.

What is most profoundly august about Walls through living amid the straits of constant economic insecurity, frequent threats of family separation by social agencies, and dangers of physical harassments was her strong sense of responsibility for her life and for her family that enabled her to endure the existential predicaments. Many people mired in such situations might have develop disputatious streaks of rebellion against everything ascribed to them. However, Walls and her siblings took different attitudinal values to their existential dilemmas: they held on to a sense of purpose and a tenacious grasp on togetherness nurtured by their yearning to achieve a higher aim in life. In fact, such attitude toward life corresponds to one of the tenets of Logotheraphy: in order to find a meaning of life however trivial or nihilistic it many seem, taking a different, constructive stance on what is ascribed helps us to rise above biological, social, and cultural inhibitions during a difficult times because we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to. Which also brings us back to Spinoza’s Amor fati axiom: a different approach to our suffering is sublimated into supremeaning of life in travails by believing in its meaning to every situation with will to live a meaningful life, which then ceases to be a suffering itself.

The literary merit of this memoir lies in its absence of unbridled namby-pamby outpourings of emotions in the narrative with a certain air of stoicism. Ironically, Walls’s frank, touchy-willy, matter-of-fact manner of discoursing her story belies her overwhelmingly heartrending heartaches, disappointments, and dismay smothered under factual descriptions of her past that renders the authority of truth and the power of reality without hindrance of prohibitive emotions that often results in fabrication. In her literary confession, Wall achieves catharsis by putting what was in her mind on pages after pages, pushing her pen through in expense of her will to come to terms with her parents, let alone herself, producing forgiveness of her parents’ wrongdoings and acceptance of their frailties in a package of love and tenderness.

All in all, Walls’ s message to her reader is clear: you can’t choose your fate, such as a family, but you can choose what to make out of what you are given. In one way or another, the story itself chimes the bells of emotions and thoughts of many of us: the problems and issues that the Walls had and the ones we have or had may have are not oranges and apples through our voyages of life. Walls shows us that notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of life, self-reliance, resilience, and determination helps us to sail through with cheerfulness and humor as handmaids to courage. This honest-to-goodness tale of a woman rising above the planes of her inhibitions speaks straightly to our hearts. This book is a one-of-kind testament to its veracity and quality that upon reading this book, you will feel as if you knew Walls telling a story with a sense of elemental kinship which you can relate to. Moreover, this bona fide memori gives us a sense of relief that no family is perfectly blissful, which resonates with Tolstoy’s view of families as inscribed on the first page of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

7 people found this helpful

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evergreen

A shocking true story....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 6, 2020

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An autobiographical account by the author, who was brought up by neglectful parents, who by choice lived a maverick, hand to mouth existence in America. They were both highly intelligent, creative individuals, who inherited land and property and could have given their children a comfortable life, yet they despised and spurned conventional lifestyles. Instead, believing themselves to be morally superior to others, they become drifters, moving from one place to another, dragging their children along with them...often living in abject poverty.
The wilful neglect of the children is shocking and heart breaking. At the age of three the author receives extensive burns and nearly dies when she is allowed to use a gas hob without any parental supervision. One child does die in infancy, though it is claimed to be of natural causes (I rather doubt that given the neglect described).
In addition to neglect, there is the mental torture ...one child, when in her late teens is so tormented by her mother that she stabs her and ends up spending time in jail.
This is not the sort of book you are likely to "enjoy", but it is certainly worth reading. It is inspiring in so far as the
surviving children come through it all and go on to lead happy and fulfilling adult lives and that is a remarkable achievement.
The book also raises philosophical questions...as to what is good and bad when raising children. For instance did it widen the children's horizons by living in so many different places? Did they in fact learn to be independent due to the neglect...ie was it good for them in some ways?. Can children be truly "happy" in such families? ...Can it be said that despite all the neglect, that underneath it all these parents loved the children? Regarding the latter, the author seems to think they did and I can understand that. But I doubt it.
Yes the parents may have shown occasional kindnesses, but I can't see that these are sufficient to compensate for the overall neglect. I might have had more sympathy for the parents if they'd had no choice...if they had done their best under difficult circumstances, if they had made an effort, but my impression from the book is that all they cared about was themselves and having their freedom to do as they pleased. I'm sorry if that is unfair and obviously I never met them and have never walked in their shoes as it were....but I just couldn't see any love there.

6 people found this helpful

Cat Buchanan

A crystal clear window on another world

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 21, 2022

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It's a fine line that separates a free-spirited nomadic lifestyle from abject neglect in this unputdownable memoir by Jeannette Walls which so gripping I read it in two great greedy gulps late into the night right up till dawn. Despite the most dire of indigent circumstances this family display a remarkable degree of resilience (and charm) forged at the coalface of having to contend with each other during a steady descent into stigmatized poverty and starvation. Initially easy to empathize with a mother who 'Treats the Ten Commandments more like the Ten Suggestions' and prefers creating lasting art to cooking an ephemeral meal, surreptitiously sucking on a chocolate bar while leaving only margarine out for her children contributes to a catalogue of abuse caused by inattentive ambivalence that no amount of imaginative Christmas gifts comprised of planets and stars can cure.
It's precisely the lack of sustenance that prompts substantive observations concerning the fact that 'Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness in any creature' which also serves as a reminder of just how steely this clan really are to have survived in relatively unscathed fashion. When reduced to living rough on the streets her parents refuse offers of financial assistance in favor of a request for electrolysis treatments and boast of their ability to conduct daily ablutions at public library bathrooms where, 'We wash as far down as possible and as far up as possible, but we don't wash possible.' This compassionately related narrative of strength and character is one of the most compelling I've ever encountered and my hats off to Walls for having the courage to share it.

2 people found this helpful

Eliza Conquest

An extraordinary account of parental negligence

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 2, 2017

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This is a well written book and something of a page turner. The writing is vivid and I felt almost as though I was involved in this family's life. It is a tale of terrible parental selfishness and neglect and at times made me feel so angry that people can treat their children in this way. Somehow the author survives intact without any bitterness towards her unbelievably eccentric mother and drunken father, and despite everything and what they have put her through manages to still love them both. I almost had to stop reading it at one point as the mother made me feel so angry at her unspeakable selfishness and the father taking money from his teenage children who had to work part time out of school to survive, but generally the book has a happy ending - although inevitably one of the four children suffers badly, but we never know what really happens to her. Well worth reading.

15 people found this helpful

Nettlefairy

Interesting, eye opening, shocking must read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 18, 2020

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Wow, what an eye opening read! It is very well written and really draws you in to her experience so that you can relate to how it must have been for her growing up like this.

Shocking at times, I found myself feeling awfully frustrated with her parents! I do believe that they love their children in their own way but just have their own warped, weird outlook on life which is actually very damaging and worrying.

It is interesting to read about all of the different places they lived in their life too, you get a real feel for the surroundings and culture of different parts of America. The Appalachian mountains included!

It is an inspiration to me that this lady managed to change her life for the better despite her difficult circumstances.

I’ve seen the film too, but in my opinion he book is better as there are bits that they left out in the film.

Highly recommend!

3 people found this helpful

NaturalR

What the....!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 29, 2022

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Walls starts by thanking her parents for all they've done for her.... then proceeds to write 260 pages or so of the absolutely horrendous neglect and abuse they put her through!!! It's so messed up and difficult to read.

The last 50 pages is her in New York which makes the book seem oddly paced. As if Walls needed to vent her trauma rather than tell a story. The building of her life is rushed over but I suppose it was much easier to survive economically back when this took place, compared to now.

I read it all in a weekend because it is compelling. It's just... extremely messed up.

One person found this helpful

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