The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls, 2005
Memoir & biography Science fiction
A daughter of brilliant drifters grows up hungry, ashamed, and fiercely loyal, then has to decide what to do with the past. Walls writes with a wry, tender voice, and the family's instability gives the pages a steady unease beneath the warmth.
Feels like tenderness and unease. About family and power.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you are drawn to family memoirs that mix affection with clear-eyed unease. The hunger, neglect and shame are steady presences, so some chapters are bleak rather than comforting.
Why read it
It offers a clear-eyed look at how loyalty and resentment can share one family, and why leaving can be as complicated as staying.
A page from the book
The distance between a nice evening out and the life you came from.
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. Jeannette Walls.Walls was a New York columnist who kept her homeless parents secret from friends; The Glass Castle stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for years.
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Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Glass Castle for me?
- You may like this if you are drawn to family memoirs that mix affection with clear-eyed unease. The hunger, neglect and shame are steady presences, so some chapters are bleak rather than comforting.
- What is The Glass Castle like?
- Walls writes with a wry, tender voice, and the family's instability gives the pages a steady unease beneath the warmth. Feels like tenderness and unease. About family and power.
- What should I read after The Glass Castle?
- If you liked The Glass Castle, try Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris), Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs) and The Road (Cormac McCarthy).
A taste of the feed
The particular guilt of a well-behaved person in a police state.
I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I’m unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It’s all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim · David Sedaris
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
What the anger is doing for you, and what it spares you.
I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.
I'm Glad My Mom Died · Jennette McCurdy
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