This amazing book is the memoir of a girl brought up in a dysfunctional family. Her mother had mental health problems, and her father ditto, plus he was an alcoholic. She lived with her parents and three siblings in poverty and squalor, in a variety of situations.

She had a special relationship with her father, who seemed intelligent and charismatic, as well as being eccentric, utterly unreliable and sometimes violent. Slowly that relationship was eroded due to his appalling behaviours. Yet towards the end of the book he sort of redeems himself. In spite of his problems he obviously loved her in his way, and amazingly she had the generosity of spirit to love him back.

The book almost reduced me to tears on several occasions. The author has not got one jot of self pity, but the things she describes are often heartbreaking. Her childhood was an horrendous example of parental abuse. The author used to raid the school bins after the other pupils had eaten their lunches, to get her 'lunch' that way, and the kids often had to raid dumpsters for food. Once, for three days running, their parents just fed them popcorn. For one period of their lives, their house was freezing in winter. If they wanted water they had to go to a neighbour with a bucket, as their house was all iced up. Then their loo broke, so instead they used a plastic bucket on the kitchen floor. They didn't always have houses to live in though, sometimes they just slept in the car.

All this time, the mother had land in Texas roughly valued at around a million dollars.

With the exception of one sister, who moved away to California, we are told that the author and her siblings all went on to lead successful and contented lives - they were all outstandingly able. For me it verges on miraculous that they survived such torturous childhoods and went on to live fulfilling lives. (They weren't just deprived childhoods - rather their mother dismissed all sorts of very real problems in their lives, and their father continually lied and stole from his wife and children.)

The book is beautifully and powerfully written. It matters so much to me (& I'm sure everyone who has read this book), that the author achieved success as a journalist, and is now in a happy relationship. I can't think of anyone in the world who deserves it more.... I don't blame the parents in any way for what happened - they had their problems - but I am very glad that things ended up the way that they did.

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 sooner they "get it" the better for them. In the book, this is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the case of Walls' youngest sister, who spent the least amount of time in the presence of her parents dysfunction, and yet was finally the most crippled of all the children.

Of course, I admit, I have a firmly-seated belief that the strongest and most creative of personalities are forged in fire; Maureen just didn't get burned enough to see the necessity of making a different life for herself. That, and she was separated from her other siblings by so many years that they took care of her more than they tried to include her in their effort to survive.

I loved this book. Walls' short (but revealing) scenes were detail and character-driven, and there were several times I caught myself chuckling at some absolute absurdity or marveling at an unexpected bit of wisdom from someone who should have been a totally unreliable source.

And I guess that's one of the main things I came away with after reading this book. Wisdom can come from anyone...whether we like them or not. And the trick to surviving is to take those things that make us better and stronger with us, and to leave the rest behind.

It's no secret that I get to read on the job. I proofread for a financial publisher, which means that I spend my days getting lost in the lilting legalese of prospectuses, trustee meeting results, shareholder reports, highlight sheets – it's riveting stuff, trust me. But we're a small operation with only a few clients and the fiscal schedule is defined by a feast-or-famine work flow: While the numbers are still being tabulated, portfolio managers are polishing their semiannual interviews and style redesigns are being approved before the work descends in avalanches, I’m usually catching up on my reading with on-the-clock me-time.

Since it’s almost instinctive to dislike the person whose job it is scrutinize and correct everyone else’s work (especially when said person has one of the few oh-so-coveted offices with a window overlooking the bucolic charm of two parking lots and a heavily traveled roadway), I have spent the better part of my three years there endearing myself to my coworkers to soften the blow when I literally cannot hack through a report because it’s so choked with errors. My efforts have mostly paid off and a number of my mom-aged coworkers have grown rather maternal with me, as it’s also not a secret that I stopped speaking to my parents more than two years ago.

When a coworker recently came into my office brandishing an almost-finished book and saying that she kept thinking of me while reading this memoir she couldn’t put down, I assumed she was referring to the way I always have my nose in some kind of reading material at work. And then a little bit of research revealed that “The Glass Castle” was about growing up under the rule of parents who clearly had no business accepting the responsibility of parenthood, which was when I realized that this was my coworker’s way of reaching out to me.

A couple of days and maybe about 100 pages (and a lot of wincing because, holy crap, the Walls kids are tiny troopers) later, I got into a car accident during my commute home via a road that sees about seven or eight accidents a day, most of them during rush hour because it is a totally good idea to have a direct route to and from Philly narrow down to two lanes in one of the area’s larger suburban oases. Long story short, I escaped the ordeal with my admittedly low expectations of humanity exceeded by miles. As I watched the tow-truck driver (who was totally cool with my nervous habit of asking a thousand rapid-fire questions as he drove both my car and me to the auto-body shop) load up my beloved, battered car with minimal fanfare, the last sigh of relief I heaved tasted something like “At least I don’t have to explain this to my parents.”

The thought resurfaced throughout the evening, like when my husband met me at the mechanic's and I just lost whatever composure I'd been faking when he was right there to help me out of the truck before pulling me into a bear hug. And later when my in-laws, who live right next door and treat me like the daughter they’ve always wanted, greeted me with open arms, said that Mom’s car was all ready for me whenever I was ready to go back to work (as they all but told me that I was going to stay home for a day or two) and reiterated that “A car can be replaced but you can’t” every other sentence and meant it.

By the time I was going fetal on my couch and started to feel the damage that a seat belt and steering wheel are capable of (which is surprisingly extensive when you’re a small-statured, large-chested woman who always knew she’d pay for leaning too far forward while driving), still marveling over how I received neither a single verbal evisceration nor a ticket after two of the most emotionally draining hours of my recent existence, I blurted some garbled admission to my husband about not knowing how to stop expecting someone to punish me, which is about when I realized that I’ve spent my adult life bracing myself to be torn down for every misstep as if the fate of the universe relied on me not fucking up, which isn’t entirely unlike the way my parents reacted to the staggering majority of the things that came naturally to me.

I called out of work for two days not because my boobs were bleeding (they were) or because it hurt to move my neck (it did) or because pulling open doors made me feel like my chest was on fire (holy crap, did it ever), though my collection of minor injuries eased the terminally itchy conscience that won't even be appeased by having a valid excuse for calling out and leaving other people to pick up my slack unless I accept a load of Catholic-sized guilt in exchange lest I give myself a few justifiable recovery days without the appropriate reciprocal suffering. I needed some time to consider how much an inherently lousy experience opened my eyes to damage I didn’t even know I was still carrying around (what the hell, surely talking about going to therapy is just as good as actually going, right?). My coping method of choice? Alternately napping like a champ and juggling three books, including this memoir of the girl who was born to a bitterly brilliant drunk she idolized and an indifferent, self-involved artist who she tried so hard to understand, only to become the person she was meant to be with little support from the two people who should have been there to cheer her on all the way.

Like I’d said, I knew I wasn’t going to be unbiased in how I approached Jeannette Walls’s coming-of-age story: No matter how sympathetically she painted her parents (which she did quite well), I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from resenting them for failing their children. But then the little-girl hero worship Jeanette felt for her tortured, misunderstood genius of her father just struck every raw nerve I have and just poked and poked until I had to physically distance myself from the book. The killer was that I’d stew in whatever calamity last befell these children to the point of needing to know how things were resolved (or avoided entirely). It's distracting to be doing other things and thinking about the book you'd rather be reading.

Not even the blatantly narcissistic ravings of Jeannette’s mother sounded enough alarms to keep me from venturing back to this book if I’d stray too far for too long. And I’d’ve thrown the book across the room at Mrs. Walls’s “I’m not crying because you’re leaving me for New York City; I’m crying because you’re going and I’m not!” outburst had I not already been forced to corral all my determination to return this borrowed book in acceptable condition after Mama W -- whose “Oh, I don’t believe in discipline because children need to learn their own lessons” philosophy barely disguised the maternal disinterest and selfish absence that I know all too well – wailed that she has sacrificed so much for her children when the scamps had demonstrated time and again that they’re more responsible for their family than the matriarch is. I, uh, may have transferred a lot of my own lingering anger at my emotionally damaging mother onto Mrs. Walls, which makes me question how justified my screaming dislike of her is.

The less said about Papa Walls, the better. My father might not have been a hopeless drunk but I kind of wish he had some kind of excuse for routinely breaking promises to the children who thought the sun rose and set on him. An absent mother is easy to hate while growing up and even easier to pity once you’ve come of age. That simpering animosity is something you get used to after a while and, if you’re like Jeannette and a better person than I am, you simply accept that your self-involved mother has constructed such an elaborate alternate reality around herself that nothing real can get through to her if she doesn’t want it to, that she can even turn homelessness into an enviable adventure. But an idolized father’s fall from grace? The older you get, the harder it is when you finally realize the one person you’ve told yourself can do anything is the person who's let you down with the least remorse. That first hard look at how helpless and broken the man behind the curtain is.... that is not easy to come back from. That’s how little girls grow up to become giant messes.

When Jeannette found her way to the school paper and sampled her first taste of print journalism's sweet, sweet escapist nectar.... oh, my heart went out to her younger self in eagerly over-earnest ways. Being a half-consumed whiskey bottle rolling around an otherwise empty desk away from calling herself a true-blooded journalist at such a young age would have won me over if the entire book preceding such a moment hadn't already made me want to see Jeannette find her place in the world. Newsroom nostalgia will always be the easiest way to my too-soft heart.

I am amazed that this isn’t one of those “Oh my God, so let me tell you about my super-sad story so you’ll feel just awful about the craptastic childhood I had and then you’ll be totally amazed at how far I’ve come and how functional I am hey, why don’t you love me yet please love me and feel sorry for me I need your sympathy give it to me” memoirs, thank bouncing Baby Jesus. It’s a documentation of these things that happened to the four Walls children and how at least three of them embraced responsible independence and sibling camaraderie. Walls describes what she sees, reporting the facts and supplying exposition as needed like any good journalist. Also like a good journalist, emotions get minimal face time here. Jeannette is the perfect narrator because it seems as though she is the most willing to accept her parents for what they are. Even though I selfishly wanted to know how her adult self dealt with the fallout of her turbulent childhood (because every little adult grows up to be a big child, let's be honest), I found myself admiring how Jeannette was in no way reliant on cheap feelings to maneuver the story to its conclusion.

Jeannette and her siblings are the heroes of this story. They get themselves out of a bad situation one by one, fishing out each younger sibling as the means become available. Because what’s a better introduction to a new life of stability after years of only knowing that what comes next is an obstacle you can rely on exactly yourself and your equally young siblings to overcome?

Christ, I still have two more reviews to catch up on and a stack of pumpkin pancakes that are clearly not going to eat themselves (unless they plan to fight me for the privilege). In short, this book was fucking great but it struck far too close to home in ways I may have overly personalized. It didn't make me laugh like it did my coworker but it sure as hell did make me appreciate how Jeannette Walls turned out. I've had a lot of people recently and unknowingly demonstrate that humanity might not be as awful as I've always thought it to be, and witnessing a grown child forgive her parents for their many crimes against her certainly made for the kind of book that confirmed it's probably time to fix my perspective. Maybe we're not as fucked of a species as I've feared all along.

اعتراف میکنم بین ژانرهای مختلف، به زندگینامه ها کمترین علاقه ممکن رو دارم ولی بازم سراغ این کتاب رفتم (بهرحال نمره هاش خیلی خوبه). اوایل کتاب ریتم تندی داره و شوکه کننده هست و آدم رو میخکوب می‌کنه اما هرچقدر بیشتر میگذره بیشتر دچار تکرار مکررات میشه و عناصری که اوایل داستان باعث جذابیت کتاب شده بودن کم کم تکراری میشن، تاثیر خودشون رو از دست میدن و داستان خسته کننده میشه. لحن نویسنده هم کمکی به بهتر شدن ماجرا نمیکنه. انگار زجر کشیدن خانوادش و در سختی بزرگ شدنش مایه مباهاتشه و داره فخر میفروشه و علاوه بر این هیچ حسی رو از متن منتقل نمیکنه. خلاصه که به دلم ننشست.

n  ‘Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.’n

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir that grips the reader from the very first page. Walls invites us into her unconventional and often tumultuous childhood, where she and her siblings navigated poverty, instability, and the unpredictable whims of their brilliant yet deeply flawed parents. With searing honesty and poignant reflection, Walls paints a vivid portrait of her upbringing, from their nomadic lifestyle to the chaos and contradictions within their family dynamic.

Through it all, Walls emerges as a resilient and insightful narrator, grappling with her conflicting feelings of love, anger, and forgiveness towards her parents. The Glass Castle is a testament to the human capacity for resilience and redemption, as Walls ultimately finds strength and solace in confronting her past.

With its raw emotion and compelling storytelling, this memoir is a powerful reminder of the enduring power of the human spirit. Whether you're drawn to tales of triumph over adversity or simply seeking a deeply moving and thought-provoking read, The Glass Castle is an unforgettable journey that will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.

Highly Recommend.

4.5

My first impression was wrong. At first, the narration seemed flat, distant, emotionless---detached, not in a derogatory way-nor to detract from the writing, which is often rich, quietly confident, reassuring, strong…..without faking bravery---raw, open, honest, unapologetic---totally without judgment---even when realizing her mother had always had millions of dollars accessible.

There were emotions—yes—shock, frustration; surprise that there is hope that she’s mistaken—it can’t be true. But, there is no judgment. Ms. Walls is intuitively inclusive, wise and mature way too soon with countless reasons to be angry, bitter, disgusted, blaming so many people and systems….but so lean on survival—she’s too efficient for wasteful….even negative emotions….cooler than anyone should be, she may take note of her emotions but more than a passing though is simply too indulgent when there’s always another fire to put out….literally and metaphorically in this case.

Overly-Woke to Family Values

Jeanette 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 mention numerous punctures, falls, fights, and a questionable diet - these were routine events before she turned eight years old. Medical care was for sissies according to dad. And according to mother “Fussing over children who cry only encourages them.”

Both mom and dad were fantasists, and therefore good story-tellers. Their poverty, instability, inability to create social relationships, they claimed, were a blessing. The children could grow up hardened to the world’s oppression. And boy was there a lot of that. Dad was paranoid about the FBI, the CIA, and all the other members of the police-gestapo who were out to get him. But, hey, the constant need to be ready to ‘skedaddle’ from any temporary home in some God-forsaken mining shanty town was an opportunity to see the country wasn’t it? An education in itself really. And dad’s get-rich-quick ideas for gold-mining were sure to pay off just as soon as he could get the necessary capital together at the Las Vegas craps tables.

Walls inherited her father’s story-telling gene. She writes with wit and humour about a deplorable life with incompetent and psychotic parents. I find this distressing. The issue is not one of an acceptably eccentric alternative life style, or of an odd upbringing being overcome, or of children loving their parents in tough circumstances. It’s patently about unnecessary and avoidable abuse. Walls’s wit and humour romanticize her life. The poignancy of her portrayal of the caring dad after he almost killed her yet again, with no apparent irony much less sarcasm, is typical: "’You don't have to worry anymore, baby,’ Dad said. ‘You're safe now.’” This makes her book popular. And it may provide a way for her to deal with the effects of her childhood. It will certainly make a good film. But the fact is that on her testimony her parents are criminally irresponsible people who are lucky they weren’t caught and prosecuted. If it were an episode of SVU, Benson would have nailed them.

"We're giving love in a family dose"
"We are family,
I got all my sisters with me"
Rodgers/Edwards, We Are Family, 1978.

The Glass Castle is a family fugue, with odes of joy mincing oh so many winces. Drunk dad, manic mom, 4 kids, living in poverty. I think this broke my all-time record for head shakes during reading, at what those parents put those kids through and the hell they gave each other.

Yet, for all that the dad and mom took away and denied their children, they bestowed upon them a vivid imagination, a healthy self-reliance, and a sometimes wonderful way of looking at the world and thinking "everything's gonna be alright." More valuable tools than most in the world were given by their parents.

This is a tender and beautiful reminder that we're all human, we all make mistakes (some more than others), but none of us are fit to judge (unless the kids' safety or welfare are endangered).

We won't be privy to the magical thinking powers of some among us, and would likely be as shocked at its original source as we'd be amazed at the strength and succor it provides them.

“I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.” ― Maya Angelou

Highly recommended. 4.6 stars.

The Glass Castle : A Memoir, c'2005, Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle is a 2005 memoir by Jeannette Walls.

The book recounts the unconventional, poverty-stricken upbringing Walls and her siblings had at the hands of their deeply dysfunctional parents.

The title refers to her father’s long held intention of building his dream house, a glass castle.

The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز یازدهم ماه فوریه سال 2017میلادی

عنوان: قصر شیشه ای؛ نویسنده: جنت (جینت) والس (والز)؛ مترجم: مهرداد بازیاری؛ تهران، هرمس، 1393، در 348ص، شابک9789643639006؛ موضوع: سرگذشتنامه فقرا، بی خانمانها، و ...؛ معتادها از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 21م

قصر شیشه‌ ای داستان سرگذشت زندگی دشوار و پرفراز و نشیب «جینت والز»، نویسنده و روزنامه‌ نگار «آمریکایی»، به قلم خود ایشان است؛ از روی این کتاب، فیلمی نیز به همین نام اقتباس شده است؛ کتاب «قصر شیشه ای»، شرح حالی درخشان، درباره ی پایداری در برابر دشواریها، و نگاهی مکاشفه آمیز به خانواده ای است، که هم، عمیقاً به سوی اضمحلال پیش میرود، و هم به شکل منحصر به فردی، سرزنده و پویاست؛ پدر کاریزماتیک و نابغه ی «جینت»، در حالت عادی، قوه ی تخیل فرزندانش را پرورش میداد، و به آنها، «فیزیک»، «جغرافیا»، و چگونگی مقابله ی بدون ترس با مشکلات زندگی را، میآموخت؛ اما زمانیکه او الکل مصرف میکرد، به آدمی دروغگو، و خرابکار بدل میشد؛ مادر «جینت» هم زنی وارسته بود، و در نظرش، مسئولیت خانه و خانوده اش، آزادی او را سلب میکرد؛ «جینت» با استفاده از هوش و زیرکی خود، موفق میشود خود را از این مهلکه بیرون بکشد، اما چیزی که قصه ی او را متفاوت میسازد، توصیفات محبت آمیز، و عاشقانه ای است، که او از والدین غیرمعمول خود، ارائه میکند؛ کتاب «قصر شیشه ای»، داستانی تکان دهنده درباره ی عشقی بی قید و شرط است، که زندگی خانواده ای درگیر با مشکلاتی بزرگ را، از ویرانی نجات میدهد

نقل نمونه هایی از متن: (هیچ وقت نباید از کسی متنفر باشی، حتی از بدترین دشمنانت؛ هر کسی، خوبیهایی دارد؛ باید آن خوبیها را پیدا کنی و آن شخص را به خاطر آنها دوست داشته باشی)؛ (زندگی نمایشنامه ای پر از تراژدی و کمدی است؛ باید یاد بگیری که از قسمتهای خنده دار، کمی بیشتر لذت ببری)؛ (میخواستم به دنیا بفهمانم که زندگی هیچکس کامل نیست، و حتی کسانیکه به ظاهر همه چیز داشتند نیز، رازهایی برای خود دارند.)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 30/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 17/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

“Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”



Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is a compelling memoir. It’s no stretch to say Walls had an unconventional childhood. It’s part adventure, part how do I live through this and make it to the next day. Walls’ matter-of-fact tone makes an account of her childhood effective and keeps it focused on the events which both brought her family together as well as those which tore them apart. She is not a victim in this memoir. She doesn’t ask for sympathy for herself and she doesn’t blame her parents for how she was raised (much). In fact, she finds parts of her parents’ behavior (when not bordering on outright neglect) admirable.

Walls easily could have talked about any of several traumatic experiences and how she was scarred by them (and perhaps is still working through issues). If she had gone that route, The Glass Castle would have been a completely different book. Still, by the end of this memoir, the reader marvels at how Walls (as well as her siblings) escaped their parents while still maintaining a relationship with them. An amazing read!

What a great, enduring story of survival! These kids are fighters!

I’m glad I read this memoir and that my real-life book club choose this for the month of November. It’s one of the best memoirs that I’ve read and I loved how the author, Jeannette Walls had a sense of peace about her parents by the end of the book. Kudos to her for not being bitter with how she was raised. Not many people could manage this with the type of conditions that she lived in.

The parents were terrible, selfish and I hated them by the end of this book. I would get so sad and angry that they didn’t take care of their kids. Their kids were starving, freezing and living in the worst possible conditions. The father was an alcoholic and the mother was a lazy, waste of space. They both took no responsibility for holding down a job or taking care of 4 children. This is a perfect example of the system failing and having addicts taking care of children. It’s just not a formula for success. So with that said, it blows my mind that three of the four kids became successful and persevered. Well done Walls' kids!

The writing was well done in this memoir. The book went in a well-defined pace and it was easy to read. If you’re looking for a good memoir, check this one out. You will not be disappointed but likely pissed off by the time you've finished the book! Ha!

I really enjoyed this memoir a lot. It is well written, interesting, and insightful. I liked getting this look into a family life that was so unlike mine. That being said, her story is so powerful and moving because despite all the things that happen to her she is still loving and forgiving.
Overall really fantastic, this has probably ruined me for any other memoirs.