The Glass Castle, By Jeannette Walls

She has always felt a responsibility to take care of her siblings, earn money to help with finances, and control her father when he was drunk, even taking him home from the bar. Jeannette would try to bring food home for her siblings when she found any extra. At one point she says, “I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping my promise that I’d protect her.” (206) In reality, Jeannette should not be the one in charge of protecting her siblings and making sure they have enough food and necessities but she does because her parents don’t. She also feels the need to make extra money because her parents don’t have steady incomes. By the age of thirteen, she was the head of the household for the summer and had a job that paid forty dollars a week. (209, 215) She was making more money than either of her parents and she wasn’t even old enough by law to have a job. Another example of her maturity beyond her age is when Rose Mary makes Jeannette retrieve her father from the bar when he doesn’t come home after a couple of days. (181) This a job that Rose Mary should be doing herself but instead she sends Jeannette so she doesn’t have to deal with

American journalist, writer, and magazine editor David Remnick once said, “The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy.” In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls the main character and author of the book tells of her crazy and adventurous life she experienced with her not so ordinary family. This quote relates to The Glass Castle, because like it states, life is full of both tragedies and beauty which is exactly what Jeannette experienced growing up with her free spirited and non-conformative parents. Walls is able to express her main purpose of the book that life is a mix of good and bad times through imagery, tone, and pathos.

Jeannette’s self-reliant behavior is frequently shown through her refusal of help from others. On one trip to retrieve her father from a bar, Jeannette’s father is so drunk that he can no longer walk. Another man offers to drive them home, and

Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.

Jeanette’s father is a man that is extremely smart in science and math, and an amazing storyteller, however he drinks/smokes way too much and can be very abusive. Her mother is a religious and tough woman, who could live with basically any situation and will go through with something until it is done. Jeanette’s tone to her parents, however, is not of happiness, but instead sadness, because of the father’s behaviors, and her mother’s stubbornness to stay with him. The tone towards their actions from Jeanette is dismay, because for almost all of their actions, both her mother and father don’t think about the consequences before they

When Jeannette’s mother did come, it was evident that she cared about the safety and well-being of her child: “Mom ran into the room” (9). Seeing as she came running rather than strolling, it can be inferred that her mother is attentive and worried about her daughter; however, once in the hospital, her father has an averse reaction to her injuries and the fact that she’s in the hospital when he says: “You shouldn’t be in this antiseptic joint” (13). Most parents would fret over their child and let the hospital do whatever they saw fit to help their child, but her father Rex doesn’t trust the hospital and potentially jeopardizes his daughter’s health by not adhering to the hospital's recommendations. A parallel episode to this tragic fire incident is when the family is staying at a hotel and are woken up in the middle of the night by a fire. The whole building burns down, similar to how Jeanette's favorite pink dress was completely singed and had to be cut

Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.

One bottle after another was the everyday life of Rex Walls. In many occasions, Rex frequently moved his family around and changed the place they called home. In reality, the only thing that needed changing was Rex’s bad habits of alcohol. He was a true example of someone suffering from alcoholism which effected himself and everyone around him. Alcoholism is a medical condition in which an individual frequently consumes too much alcohol and becomes unable to live a normal life (Campbell). In the memoir The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette exposes the cruel reality she and her family had to face growing up. She recalls all the empty nights when she would have to go from bar to bar looking for Rex, and unmask the difficult times that came with having a father overpowered by alcohol. Her father’s abuse of alcohol affected his children’s life growing up and destroyed any chance of his family ever living a normal life.

In the novel, Jeannette’s younger brother, Brian, cracks his head open and their parents, Rex and Rosemary, choose to bandage their child’s head by themselves rather than taking their child to the hospital for proper care. This scene not only shows that the parents are ignorant enough to refuse to send their child to medical attention, but it validates that the parents have a skewed attitude towards the health and welfare of their children. Jeannette’s parents strongly do not believe in hospitals, and the only reason that Jeannette is in the hospital is because their neighbour had been willing to take her to receive help. What is striking is that her parents are lazy to the point that they do not care about their children, even if they are suffering and injured severely. The fact that this is Jeannette’s earliest memory of her family indicates how significant her ordeal was and her brother’s as well.

Thinking to herself he must be correct about how he was teaching her. Many people would have called this child endangerment, throwing a child into the water only to drown for a short period of time. Only then would he pull her out to clinch onto the very man who through her to the water. Time and time again until something clicked in her to stay away from the very thing that was trying to hurt her. Most parents would show their children how they swam, took it slower until they finally had to make them do it on their own without the parents help. Rex Wells had a more rough to the deges way of teaching his

You learn in the first line of the book that Jeannette was once disgraced by the way her mother and father lived. Jeannette was so ashamed that she actually slid down in her seat and asked her driver to bring her back home after seeing her mother rummage through the dumpster. Jeannette later met with her mother Rose Mary which stated that Jeannette needs to just tell the truth about who her parents are. Jeannette thought if she shared the truth about her parents and her past that she would lose everything that she worked so hard for but she still felt like telling the truth was something she had to

Through her youth, Jeannette faced many hardships due to her negligent parents. Even so she always had an sanguine outlook on life. Jeannette fell out of a moving car and was abandoned. Her father didn’t even notice until hours after. Instead of being shocked or terrified of the situation, she laughs it off.

The Glass Castle; a memoir by Jeannette Walls is a heart wrenching story of a family that learned what loyalty is and is not. The family is dysfunctional and unique. It was eye-opening to read about this family moved from place to place not knowing where they would end up, what they would eat or what they would wear. Reading about how the Walls kids dealt with mental illness and alcoholism was indeed eye opening.

“The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls is an extremely captivating novel that really kept my attention throughout the entire story. It’s a fascinating story of growing up in circumstances that kept me shaking my head as I turned the pages. The Walls family is unquestionably one unlike any I’ve ever come across. The lessons and experiences that the children learned and endured were ones that molded their lives and established who they are today. Jeanette Walls goes through many descriptions of situations that she faced that people normally should not face. For most of her childhood, her family traveled from town to town because her parents always thought that they would hit it big, unfortunately her father was never ever to find a

Both of Jeannette’s parents were irresponsible and couldn’t hold a job; her father was a drunk