The myth of the resourceful child
Jeannette Walls's memoir is fascinating, sad, and incredibly frustrating on behalf of the children in it.
I finished The Glass Castle feeling interested, sad, and extremely frustrated.
The memoir opens with adult Jeannette Walls sitting in a cab in New York and seeing her mother digging through a dumpster. Jeannette is successful by then. Her mother is homeless by choice, or at least insists that she is. That scene basically tells you what the whole book is going to be about: loving your parents while also realizing that their choices do not make sense and may never make sense.
Then the book goes back to Jeannette's childhood, and almost immediately she is three years old, cooking hot dogs by herself, and catches on fire.
That scene stayed with me because it establishes something the memoir does over and over again. The children are put in situations they should never have to handle, and then their ability to handle them becomes part of the family mythology.
Her father Rex later takes her out of the hospital without paying. The family repeatedly leaves towns in the middle of the night. They call it doing the "skedaddle," which sounds adventurous when you are a kid. As an adult reading it, it is obvious that they are often fleeing bills, jobs, consequences, or some other mess the parents created.
That gap between how the children understand something and how the reader understands it is one of the best parts of the book.
It is also maddening.
There are periods when the family has money or stability and you can see how easily their lives could improve. In Phoenix, Rose Mary's mother has left her a house and money. Rex gets work. The kids have food, bikes, and school. It lasts for a while. Then Rex loses the job, drinks, and the family slides back into chaos.
Welch is worse.
The house has no running water or indoor plumbing. Rex talks about building the Glass Castle, the dream house he has been promising the family for years. Jeannette and Brian literally dig the hole for the foundation.
Eventually the family fills the hole with garbage.
That might be the most efficient metaphor in the whole memoir.
Meanwhile, the kids are hungry enough to go through trash or steal food. Jeannette eventually asks her mother to leave Rex and get welfare. Rose Mary refuses. Later, when she does work as a teacher, Rex takes much of her paycheck anyway.
Those were the parts that made me angry.
Not because the parents were always cruel. They weren't. Rex can be charismatic, imaginative, and genuinely loving. His relationship with Jeannette is probably the emotional center of the book. Rose Mary is intelligent and creative. Both parents can give their children a sense that the world is interesting and that conventional rules are not automatically right.
But then you get a scene like the children starving while Rose Mary keeps food for herself, or Rex taking money they badly need, and the romance of being unconventional disappears very quickly.
The thing I appreciated about Walls is that she does not flatten either parent into a monster.
She gives you enough of Rex's charm to understand why Jeannette adored him. She lets you see why a childhood built around deserts, road trips, stars, stories, and impossible plans could feel magical from the inside. She also lets the consequences sit there without trying to explain them away.
And the consequences are huge.
The children become remarkably capable because they have to. Lori gets out first and goes to New York. The others gradually follow. Jeannette builds a life that looks almost impossibly different from the one she grew up in.
I kept thinking about how easy it is to describe that as resilience and accidentally make the neglect sound useful.
It is impressive that the Walls children became resourceful.
They should not have needed to be that resourceful.
That tension is what made the book interesting to me. Jeannette can love her father and still understand that he failed her. She can see her mother's intelligence and still be furious at her choices. She can remember parts of her childhood fondly without pretending the whole thing was acceptable.
I think that is why the book works.
It never requires a clean answer to the question of what you are supposed to feel about your parents.
I still wanted to reach into the book every twenty pages and yell at them.