The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
November 19, 2007 by hintonlibrary
Jeannette Walls spent many years trying to hide from her childhood experiences. Walls is currently a contributor on MSNBC online and writes about growing up in a dysfunctional family. She recounts numerous episodes of her siblings and herself enduring hunger, poverty and bullying. Her candid account about growing up with a self-indulgent mother, unwilling to assume any parental responsibilities and a troubled father, who has a difficult time holding down a job, gives the reader a shocking account about relationships revolving around children and their parents and ultimately about the strength of family ties.
I found this book to be disturbing on many levels & yet illuminating at the same time. I kept wondering how parents could treat their children so carelessly – especially the mother whose only “excuse” for her behaviour was complete self-absorption. The father had addictions & clearly a hard upbringing himself to deal with. The parents’ destructive co-dependency is what I initially found so hard to accept and yet by the end of the book is what I saw so clearly as explaining why they ended up as they did. What saddened me & yet didn’t surprise me at the end of the story was not the parents’ poverty-stricken plight, but the fact that the youngest daughter fell into the cycle of addiction & a risky lifestyle. The amazing thing about this book is that these adult children still loved their parents no matter what. Yet, if the tables are turned and a parent has a child who turns to addictions & lives life on the street – does that parent stop loving that child? Not very often – the love is always there despite the desperate lives loved ones may lead.