“The Glass Castle”
How can one not get hooked by a book that starts thusly:
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.
Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog, a black-and-white terrier mix, played at her feet.
[ . . . ]
I slid down in my seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue (Wells).
Ms. Walls recounts her childhood with her intelligent, well-informed, and severely negligent parents. At age 3 she was routinely cooking her own hot dogs over a gas flame and firing guns — a pretty good shot even. Her brother slept under a rubber boat to keep the leaks from the roof off his bed. As they grew up, things did not get better.
The family reminds me of one that my Mom befriended in my childhood. The S- - - - family would arrive a dinner time: mom, five kids, and a goat. Yes, Mrs. S- - - - transported her goat around in the back seat of her station wagon, atumble with the kids back there.
We would go over to their trailer to help them clean, excavating trails in search of long-buried back bedrooms. We once found a dearly-departed kitten preserved in a shoebox. The lack of heat in the home had kept the stench at bay.
When I was a young adult, I knew another family (family M - - - -) who lived in a similar manner. The common thread I recognize betwixt the Wells family, and the S - - - - family and the M - - - - family is the value of big plans. In their worlds, big plans more than compensated for lack of ordinary day-to-day competencies. Faith in one another's future triumphs and empathetic rage against the system that thwarted them was evidence of love. Questions about how one was to get from here to there — or any other comment that revealed expectations of responsible decision-making — was evidence of disloyalty.
Theodore Dalrymple. describes this worldview and its impact on society in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, an excellent companion read to The Glass Castle.
“MORE THAN SEVEN YEARS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
The perennially bestselling, extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.
The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
The Glass Castle is truly astonishing—a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family” (Amazon).
