The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

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.

This affects how Jeannette views her life, and as a result, she wants to have a better life than

Her dad carried her away from the hospital without payment, and then her mom permitted her to cook again, moreover she said, “ Getting right back into the saddle” ( Glass Castle 47). Jeanette was not angry at such young age and soon the family had to pack their belongings into bags and “do the skedaddle” as her parents always said. The parents were fleeing from bill collectors. Although Jeanette's father was an alcoholic, he could get work almost anywhere, often in small towns. The family was moving because of these things, she never complained when they did not have enough food. Jeanette always forgave her parents, she understood what they were going through.

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.

What is the source of your success? My own definition of success is about overcoming my obstacles and hardships. If I can’t overcome the obstacles and hardships along the way, then I will try again so that I am more prepared and have the right knowledge. I want to meet obstacles and hardships because I want to feel the pleasure of success when I overcome them. In order for me to overcome and embrace hardships, I need to find the missing link, have the right knowledge, and practice effective time management.

One of the earliest memories she had that describes the way she grew up, was getting burns all over her body after trying to roast hot dogs over a fire, and getting sent to the hospital for it. Freedom was present in the family, discussing how the parents and children would go out and explore around in the middle of the night, look at the stars, and take drives or walks whenever they felt like it. Despite this, her family lived a very poor and unconventional childhood, which included events like her dad claiming the FBI was after them, living in a house with no sewer and fire system, or scraping maggots off of old food and still eating it. If they had a bloody cut from falling on the ground, normal parents would wrap them up in a bandage and tell them to stay home, but the Walls’s would wrap up the wound, and send them back outside to play again, which perfectly describes the philosophy her parents raised them up in. Rex promised his children he would build The Glass Castle if he struck it rich in the gold mine, which would be a building completely made out of glass and be ran on solar panels. Some of the most memorable memories included a point where a neighbor almost raped Jeanette and the time child services came and tried to take them away. Eventually, Jeanette along with her oldest sister, Lori, started working and

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, describes the unfortunate struggles of Jeanette and her family throughout her childhood. Often times, the hardships in one 's life can shape their future and how they develop as a person. Jeanette went through so many hardships that seem unbelievable to me. Her struggles and life experiences are much more extreme than mine will ever be. Her hardships have helped shape her personality and her career. She has made the best out of her childhood, and everyone should take a tip from Jeanette, including myself. I have not had many giant hardships in my life to this date. Jeanette is a role model to people everywhere. She showed that it doesn’t matter where or how you grow up, the only thing that matters is

The summary of the story is a memoir, which is about Jeannette and her family who are constantly low on food and money, family moving around the country a lot, and having a hard time to re-settle. The family is very dysfunctional with a multiple of stories to tell. The book is filled with much different kind of experiences that the family including Jeannette has been through together.

In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.

Jeanette Walls and her out of the ordinary family live their lives surrounded in pure craziness and poverty. Jeanette has been raised to be as independent as her age allows her. At age three she could make herself a hot dog and by the age of eighteen she had started a new life in New York away from the craziness that followed her parents throughout the kids nomadic childhood. Jeanette and her siblings Lori, Brian and Maureen live their childhoods with almost nothing. They were always wondering where their next meal would come from and where there parents had mysteriously disappeared to. Rex Walls, the father and husband was a severe alcoholic who spent most of his money on gambling or a beer from a local bar. Rose Mary Walls, the mother and wife was not better, never being to hold onto a job for long enough to get paid and support her family caused many problems for Rose Mary, Rex and most importantly… the kids. The kids all had the dream of escaping the prison their parents called home and heading to New York or California where they could feel endless happiness. The kids grow up with almost no parents, which forces them to become independent from the day they were born. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeanette's parents teach her to only rely on herself and never get attached to something you can lose, forcing Jeanette to become strong and independent throughout her childhood.

Phoenix, Arizona was their next destination. Jeanette’s original thought of living with their grandma again were cast aside as Mary reveals that she passed away during their stay at Battle mountain. Upon arrival the family stays in a fairly large house that was left in Grandma Smith’s will for Mary. Things were positive at first as the usually are, but slowly took a wrong turn as they usually do. Jeanette attends a new school where she is bullied for her intelligence, however this conflict soon ends when her brother Brian steps in and stands up for her. Rex got another job and supplied for the family as usual. Just as things were getting nice, Christmas day comes. This time the kids actually had real gifts, they each got a bike as well as small gifts they bought each other. Everything is looking up until their father got intoxicated and accidently burned their presents after opening up his, and using the lighter inside of it. Their father loses yet another job, and things tumble downwards. From people breaking into their house, touching the children, and just sleeping in the house. The big moment comes when

Have you ever heard of a family nowadays that are constantly on the move, frequently traveling throughout our country, stopping to live in one place for a couple months, then leaving for another place for a similar amount of time and doing that constantly? The Walls are a family that does do that. In the entertaining book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a young girl named Jeannette Walls learns how to become successful in life through constantly being on the move. She lived with her with her parents and her siblings. Her parents, Rex and Rose Mary would be in a huge fight one minute, then would be hugging each other the next, which made it hard for the kids to grow up. Throughout Jeannette’s unusual childhood, she learned to have acceptance

In the vivid, personal memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she painstakingly recalls her “story” and how it affected and made her who she is today. She grew up in an environment that most children typically do not. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a selfish woman who put herself first. You could say their way of parenting was not your average “cookie cutter” household. One main social issue in The Glass Castle, is the impact on child neglect in a family and how that affects the way the child turns out. Although, Jeannette Walls ended up as a successful writer along with her siblings Lori and Brian, her other sister Maureen took a route which many neglected children face. What set apart these siblings and how the

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.

“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