The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls's memoir revolves around her parents, who give the concept of bad parenting a whole new meaning. Her irresponsible romantic of a father was an inventor of outlandishly useless devices, and her mother, an artist, was his abettor. As the two of them dragged the family around the country on the run from creditors and from one bad idea to another, they virtually ignored their four hapless children, except when they were giving them shoplifting lessons or stealing their money for booze. Walls writes about these years with a hardheaded, clear-eyed acceptance and very little recrimination, and she doesn't neglect her parents' virtues, which she manages to wrest out of the slag heap: their values were both generous and idealistic, they produced self-reliant children, and they were true originals.

"[A] remarkably dispassionate account which, precisely because of the detachment of its prose, is also extraordinarily moving. Jeannette Walls's parents here join a distinguished roster of memorable monsters." - Eugene Jones (Times Literary Supplement, 10/7/05)

"An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the '60s and '70s....A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story." - (Kirkus, 12/15/04)

"The memoir offers a catalog of nightmares that the Walls children were encouraged to see as comic or thrilling episodes in the family romance....Walls has a telling memory for detail and an appealing, unadorned style. And there's something admirable about her refusal to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, to descend to the jargon of dysfunction....But what's best is the deceptive ease with which she makes us see just how she and her siblings were convinced that their turbulent life was a glorious adventure....Walls is notably evenhanded and unjudging....THE GLASS CASTLE falls short of being ar - Jason P. Fine (New York Times Book Review, 3/13/05)

"What saves this book from mind-numbing grimness is the family's extraordinary resilience. You'll root for them." - Kevin Dawson (Newsweek, 3/7/05)

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