The Glass Castle: A Memoir

The summary

Jeannette Walls was in a taxi on her way to a party when she looked out the window and saw her mother picking through a Dumpster. She slid down in the seat and had the driver take her home to Park Avenue. At lunch a few days later she admitted she’d been too ashamed to say hello. Her mother pointed a chopstick at her: “You’re way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it.” And what was she supposed to tell people? “Just tell the truth. That’s simple enough.” This is that truth, told without a verdict.

A house made entirely of blueprints

Rex Walls could fix a neighbor’s TV with a macaroni noodle and hold four children spellbound with stories in which he always flew faster and fought harder than anyone alive. He also carried blueprints from town to town: the Glass Castle, a house with glass walls and a glass staircase, solar cells on the roof, its own water purifier. He let the kids design their own rooms. All they needed first was gold, which the Prospector — his half-built sifting machine — would find.

None of it was cynical, which is what makes it unbearable. In Welch, Jeannette and her brother Brian took a pickax to the staked-off hillside and dug for a month, until the hole was deep enough to disappear in. Then, because the family couldn’t pay the trash-collection fee, their father told them to dump the garbage in it. Temporarily, he said. It filled up. That hole is the book in one image: enormous plans, actual refuse, children doing the digging.

“Adventure” was the family word for having no choice

They were always doing what Rex called the skedaddle — kids woken at midnight, fifteen minutes to pack, gone before the bill collectors caught up. He claimed the FBI was after him and smoked his cigarettes from the wrong end so the brand names burned off the butts. In Battle Mountain the four children slept in cardboard refrigerator boxes in a disused railroad depot and asked their parents not to buy real beds, because boxes were more fun. One Christmas with no money at all, their father walked each child out into the desert and let them claim a star. Jeannette picked Venus.

Then the food ran out. She ate margarine mixed with sugar because Lori said it tasted like frosting. For years she spent lunch period locked in a bathroom stall, eating what other kids had thrown away. Rose Mary — a painter with a teaching certificate she resented having — met all of it with doctrine: suffering when you’re young immunizes you, and it’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty. Told that her brother-in-law had groped her daughter, she explained that sexual assault is a crime of perception, and if you don’t think you’re hurt, you aren’t.

The escape fund

93 Little Hobart Street cost a thousand dollars: three rooms on cinder-block pillars, no running water, a toilet over a hole beneath the house, a kitchen that leaked when it rained and shocked you if you touched anything metal. In winter the dishes froze into the sink, and no snow settled on the roof, because there was no insulation. Jeannette made her own braces out of a bent coat hanger, rubber bands, and a sanitary napkin for padding, because real ones cost twelve hundred dollars.

What worked was leaving. She joined The Maroon Wave in seventh grade under Miss Jeanette Bivens — the teacher who had once talked Rex Walls into finishing high school, and after whom Jeannette was named — and by junior year she was editing it and interviewing Chuck Yeager. She, Lori, and Brian fed every dollar from babysitting, lawn-mowing, and other kids’ homework into a plastic pig named Oz for nine months. Their father cut it open with a knife and took all of it. Afterward she keeps her savings in a purse strapped under her clothes, gives up a paid summer in Iowa so the family offering it will buy Lori a bus ticket to New York, and follows her at seventeen.

Love and damage don’t settle up

New York delivers: a burger joint, then a Brooklyn weekly, then Barnard, then a gossip column where she tells a woman in a silk turban that her parents have a great old house on a hill above a river. Her parents follow her east, burn through two rooming houses, and end up on park benches. Being homeless, her mother says, is an adventure. She won’t sell her Indian jewelry, the property in Phoenix, or the Texas land — which Jeannette learns, only when her uncle dies, is worth about a million dollars.

Her father, three years into the streets, hears she is a thousand dollars short for her last year of tuition and arrives with $950 in wrinkled poker winnings and a mink coat to pawn. The same man had walked out of Christmas because a box of thermal underwear meant she thought he was a charity case. Two weeks before his heart stops at fifty-nine, they talk about the house. “Never did build that Glass Castle.” “But we had fun planning it.” “Those were some damn fine plans.” Not everyone gets out whole: Maureen, the youngest, raised mostly at neighbors’ tables, stabs their mother, spends a year in a hospital, then buys a one-way ticket to California.

The bottom line

Walls’s refusal to convict her parents is the point, not a failure of nerve. She holds both fathers at once — the one who let her pet a cheetah and had her stitch up his forearm by lamplight, and the one who slit open a piggy bank to drink his children’s savings — and that is what let her build a life instead of a case. Read it if you grew up managing an adult, or if you’ve ever hidden where you came from.