My sister saw The Glass Castle on my coffee table and said, “Oh, I read that. It’s kind of . . .” then she paused and we both were awkwardly silent for a minute. “Well, I was going to say, it’s kind of like us, a little bit, but not –““Yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t going to say it – because not all of it – ““Yeah, not all of it.”We didn’t talk about it again. When I first saw this book, I think I died a little inside because of the cover. I didn’t hate The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood like

It took me a while to get into this book, but there's a lot of interesting family dynamics and complicated familial love despite all the awful things that happened. I think this book would feel more complete if the author had written more personal insights rather than recounting things that happened. I want to read more about her reflections of the events that happened, her emotions, and how she processes her feelings towards her family.

Who here has seen the show Shameless? (I am thinking of the American version, but I know there is a British one, too, that it is based on.) To me, that show could have been inspired by this memoir. Frank Gallagher and Rex Walls are the same guy!I enjoyed all the vignettes from Jeannette Walls' life. She did a great job throwing them all together to create a story even without a specific plot. I am not sure that any of the stories lasted more than a few pages, but each one of them was interesting...

I guess I have a somewhat different frame of reference than several of the reviewers here. I can relate to many of the lessons she learned, and as such, I never had an issue believing her. These things can and do happen. The system fails children, and addicts (whether they're addicted to alcohol or excitement) will seek their fix above all else. As long as the addiction is in the picture, the person just doesn't exist. Children in alcoholic families eventually become aware of this, and the soone...

"The Glass Castle" is a memoir written by gossip columnist Jeanette Walls, which details her unconventional childhood growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who seems to be mentally ill. Walls begins the book by explaining what has prompted her to write about her family: after she has "made it" and become a successful writer living in New York, she comes across her mother picking trash out of a dumpster and, in shame, slinks down in her taxi seat and pretends not to see or know her. La...

This book really made me angry--why can people who have absolutely no business having kids be able to have four?Let me backtrack...In the beginning, the Walls family is always on the run. The father is an alcoholic, who is intelligent, but believes everything upon everything is a conspiracy. He can't get a job because of the mafia, the government, the gestapo...The mother has a teaching degree, but chooses to be an artist. The family is barely able to scrape by; the father spends any money they

I know many people love this book, remarking on how powerful and moving it was, but I had some deep problems with the narrator's memory process, and some issues about what lessons I was ultimately supposed to learn here. It is a riveting tale, full of unforgettable suffering, strife, and perseverance, about growing up with two bohemian-minded parents, one a raging alcoholic and the other a manic depressive. It is the story of the dangerous synergy that combination produced, and how the narrator

This memoir has to be one of the most unique memoirs I’ve ever read. My review might contain spoilers.Jeannette Walls shares the raw and honest story of her childhood leading up to adulthood. She was raised in a highly dysfunctional family with her three siblings. Her parents were like nomads and just couldn’t really settle down. Jeannette’s mother loved to read, paint, and had a teaching degree, but most of the time she refused to work. She viewed work as a waste of time. Her dad was a very int...

The warning is this: If you are going to become parents you must simply forego being too bohemian. Otherwise your children might grow up to be super successful & you will end up eating trash off dark alleyways...Peculiar upbringings are what memoirs are made of! We saw this in the Frank McCourt gray & sad "Angela's Ashes" & even more so in any of the Augusten Burroughs books (mainly "Running with Scissors"). When memoirs are like this, invigoratingly Roald Dahlesque in painting pictures of past

What I loved about this book is this: it presents her parents, with all their faults, and the poor mentality, at its worst, without anger, exasperation, or even really any judgment, just with the quirky love we all view our own childhoods. If she had been bitter in her description it would not have been believable, but instead it was tinged with forgiveness making me respect her for not only surviving such a strange childhood to become a successful, even functioning, adult but for being able to

Okay, I originally gave this one star but then had to go back and re-rate it to a two b/c I surprised a couple of you guys and in my impulsive way, I realized perhaps one star was a bit too knee jerk.It's not that I hated The Glass Castle, it's just that it irritated me with its self-conscious narrative style. Too much "look at how horrible things were!" and not enough detail or challenges to make me really care.The same stories are told and re-told throughout the memoir novel, and they rely too...

Overly-Woke to Family ValuesJeanette Walls should not be alive. Her actuarial chance of surviving was close to zero in her Keystone Cops version of childhood. With two dipsy parents, one a violent drunk, the other a spaced-out avatar of Vishnu, she had experiences which the SAS would have had difficulty enduring. Severe scalding, scorpion bites, being thrown from a moving car, locked in the back of a truck for fourteen hours, incipient starvation, drowning, and mauling by a cheetah, not to menti...

A review on the back of my copy reads:Jeannette Walls has a story to tell, and tells it brilliantly, without an ounce of pity.No pity? Yep. You've got that right. No pity and NO EMOTIONS whatsoever. And certainly no humor.Ms. Walls tells her story like a journalist, which of course, she is, but it didn't work for me that she wasn't sharing her story, but reporting the facts. I felt cheated and unsafe throughout this entire read, as though Ms. Walls was allowed to be robotic and detached, but I w...

Book Review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette WallsJeannette Walls proves in her astounding memoir that bad parenting and abject poverty do not necessarily condemn children to a dismal future of the same. In "The Glass Castle" published in 2005 by Scribner, Walls reveals the intimate details of her upbringing within a dysfunctional yet loving family. "The Glass Castle" immediately grips you with an opening scene in which Walls, as an adult in New York City, sees from the window of her taxi her moth...

Honestly, simply a must read. Wow. Firstly, thank you to my friend Elyse for recommending this book. She knows what I like. Wow this woman. Wow this family. I have just finished reading this books last pages whilst making my lasagne to feed my family, hastily stirring the white sauce and throwing in the bay leaves. The irony isn't lost on me.. I needed to finish this story. But! Mental illness is all around. This family is a perfect example, and also one of resilience. Hey, these children have m...