The Glass Castle

The first thing you hear about The Glass Castle is usually the fire, and the fire is not even the worst part. Jeannette Walls's memoir opens in her adult life, in a taxi cab, with a sentence that tells you exactly what kind of book this is going to be:

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.

Scribner published the book in March 2005 as a 288-page hardcover, and it has spent most of the years since then on bestseller lists. Walls had built a career as a journalist in New York, writing a gossip column for MSNBC, and had spent two decades telling almost nobody that she grew up in real poverty, moving through Arizona, Nevada and West Virginia with parents who would not hold jobs. The book is her finally telling it, and the framing device does the work: the woman in the Dumpster is her mother, and the woman in the taxi is the daughter who left.

Fire on the Stove

Walls's first memory is of herself at three, in a trailer park in Arizona, standing on a chair at the stove cooking hot dogs for herself and her little sister. Her dress catches. She ends up in the hospital with burns across her body and skin grafts on her stomach, ribs and chest, and her father, Rex Walls, takes her out before the bill arrives. A few days later she is back on the chair at the stove cooking again, because somebody has to.

That scene sets the arrangement for everything that follows. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children: Lori, Jeannette, Brian and Maureen. Rex was bright, funny, well read, a former Air Force man who had left his hometown of Welch, West Virginia at seventeen and never wanted to go back. He could explain physics and geology and how not to be afraid of water, and he had a bottomless confidence that something big was about to come through. Rose Mary grew up on an Arizona ranch, painted constantly, and regarded ordinary work as a betrayal of her talent. When money ran short she would say, in effect, that she could not make something out of nothing, and return to the canvas.

The children learned early what the household priorities were. There was money for paint and for Rex's nights out and there was not reliably money for groceries. The family moved often, usually in the middle of the night once creditors or school officials got close, and Rex told the kids the men chasing them were government agents and that the whole thing was an adventure. In Battle Mountain, Nevada, where they lived for several years, the food ran out for the first time, and seven-year-old Jeannette started slipping into the classroom during recess to take something from another child's lunch bag. Her brother Brian was caught stealing a jar of pickles from a neighbor and was made to eat the entire jar as punishment.

Rose Mary's refusals are described with a coolness that makes them worse than shouting. When Jeannette protested that the children were hungry after the last stick of margarine had gone, her mother collapsed in tears about how she hated living this way, and then went back to painting. On the good days Rex told stories about everything he had already done and everything he was going to do, and the children believed him, because he believed it too. The relative Jeannette loved most outside her own parents was Rose Mary's mother, Grandma Smith, who had run a ranch out west and whom she adored, in flat contrast to Erma, who would not even allow the children to call her grandmother.

The Desert and the Glass Castle

Rex's great project was a device he called the Prospector, a way of detecting gold that he worked on and never finished. When he held a job, usually as an electrician, he held it briefly, then lost it on purpose or drank himself out of it. The money that came in went to the Owl Club for drinks and meals while the children ate beans for the month. When a job did pay, Rex would sometimes take the grocery money, disappear for days with it, and come back remorseful and broke. There are scenes in this stretch that are hard to read calmly: Rex coming home wrecked and smashing things, a Christmas tree set alight in the living room while the family watched, a night when Rose Mary ended up hanging out of an upstairs window screaming that he was trying to kill her.

There is another Rex in these pages, and this is the reason the book is not simply a catalogue of neglect. He taught his children to swim by carrying them into deep water and refusing to let fear make their decisions for them. He explained why the sky was blue and how mountains were made and why stars were not something to be frightened of. On Jeannette's tenth birthday she asked him to stop drinking, and he did, for several months, and those months are remembered in the book as some of the best of her childhood. He drew up plans for the house he was going to build them one day: a glass castle with glass walls and a glass staircase, solar cells across the roof, its own water purification, and a clear ceiling so the children could watch the stars from bed. He carried the blueprints everywhere and let them choose their rooms.

That house is the whole book. It is a real object, drawn to scale by a man with genuine engineering instincts, and it never gets built. In Welch, where the family finally sank in 1970, Rex marked out the spot for the foundation with stakes and string, and Brian and Jeannette dug the hole themselves with a shovel and pickax they found at an abandoned farm. They dug it big and deep, the way he had told them a proper foundation had to be. Within a few years the hole had filled with garbage.

Welch

Welch is the middle and the heaviest third of the memoir, and roughly seven years of the story happen there. The family first stayed with Rex's parents, Erma and Ted, in the basement, sharing one bed under a coal stove, forbidden to make noise upstairs and forbidden to come up. Ted, a mild old man who had spent his working life as a railroad clerk, told the children to call him Grandpa. Erma was hostile and racist and did not want them there; the incident the children remember most from that winter is the night Jeannette walked in on Erma molesting her brother Brian, and the fight that followed got the four children banished to the basement properly. An uncle, Stanley, molested Jeannette later, and Rose Mary told her it was a matter of perception. Walls reports both plainly and moves on, which is either admirable restraint or a limit of the book, depending on the reader.

They moved to a small, rotting house on the north face of a mountain, three rooms with no plumbing and no reliable electricity and a hole in the roof that grew every winter. On winter mornings the children took turns carrying out the bucket from the night before. Dinner was sometimes cat food. Jeannette hid in the school bathroom during lunch rather than be seen with nothing, and later picked through what the other kids threw away. Rose Mary was persuaded to take a teaching job after a man from child welfare showed up at the door, and she hated it and went as rarely as she could, while Jeannette babysat, Brian did yard work and Lori ran a paper route. Every month Rex drained whatever they had managed to put together.

The escape plan comes out of that. Jeannette, Lori and Brian started pooling their money, with New York as the target, because Lori had met two documentary filmmakers who had come through town and the girls had questioned them about what life was there like. Rex found the savings and took them. So they started again, more carefully, and this time the plan worked.

The Bus North

Lori went first, in 1977, and got herself an apartment in the South Bronx. Jeannette finished her junior year of high school, told her parents she had had enough, and took a bus out of Welch at seventeen. Brian followed about a year later, and Maureen eventually joined them. The apartment was a wreck by any normal standard and the girls thought it was paradise, because it had heat, running water and electricity and nobody came into the rooms and took things.

What makes this section satisfying is that Walls does not present escape as a single dramatic break. It is a series of practical steps. She worked as a proofreader, got onto the school newspaper, did an internship at an alternative weekly in Brooklyn, and won scholarships, loans and her own earnings into Barnard College, graduating with honors in 1984. She became a reporter, then a columnist for New York magazine, then the gossip writer for MSNBC, and for twenty years she kept the West Virginia part out of her professional life, telling people she came from Virginia instead.

The other three made their own versions of the same escape. Lori became a working illustrator. Brian took the police exam at twenty and spent a career with the New York City force, later finishing a degree at night. Maureen came out last and drifted toward California and a life closer to her mother's than anyone would have predicted. Walls does not make much of the comparison, but it is there on the page: four children, one set of parents, and outcomes that ran from decorated civil servant to something nobody would call stability.

The Parents Follow

Three years after the last child left Welch, Rex and Rose Mary moved to New York too. They had almost no money, fell behind on rent, and rather than take work they became homeless on purpose, moving between shelters, churches and sidewalk grates before settling in a squat in an abandoned building with a hole in the floor of the entryway and cats throughout. It is the strangest turn in the story and Walls takes her time with it. Her parents had options, including jobs, including going back to Arizona where Rose Mary owned property, and they chose the street because it required nothing of them.

She could not enjoy her own apartment while they were out in the cold, and the book is honest about the mix of feelings: worry, anger, embarrassment, and embarrassment about the embarrassment. Rex got tuberculosis, spent six weeks in hospital, came out sober, took a maintenance job at a resort upstate and was doing well until Rose Mary talked him back into the city and the drinking resumed. When Jeannette worried about dropping out over money, he turned up with cash he had won at poker and pressed it on her along with a mink coat to sell. He was proud of her degree in a way he could not quite say. He would not attend the ceremony.

The Ending That Refuses to Choose

Late in the book Rex calls his daughter to say he is dying. They meet and spend their last hours together going over the adventures, the moves, the castle he never built, and he dies of a heart attack shortly afterward, at fifty-nine, in the last movement of the book. The ending does something unusual: it refuses to settle into either forgiveness or prosecution. Her mother is still alive, still squatting, still painting, still uninterested in explaining herself, and Jeannette still goes to see her.

That choice divides readers. People who grew up in orderly homes tend to find the affection generous and disarming. People who grew up like this sometimes find it too easy, since the parents are never made to answer for the hunger or the abuse, and Rose Mary in particular gets away with a charm that the narrative does not press. There is also a structural drag in the middle: hunger and desperation cycle through Welch in episodes that begin to blur, and the same argument between the children and their mother gets run several times with different props. The prose itself stays plain and unsentimental throughout, with almost no lyricism, and Walls keeps her own reactions mostly out of sight, which keeps the book moving even when the material is grim.

What the memoir does better than most is hold two facts at once. Rex Walls stole the food money and he taught his daughter not to be afraid, and the book will not let you drop either one. For readers who want a courtroom verdict on bad parents, this will feel evasive. For anyone interested in how a person builds a self out of a childhood like that, it is close to unmatched. The 2017 film adaptation, with Brie Larson as the adult Jeannette, brought it to a wider audience again. Walls had published a book of gossip writing called Dish before this one, and followed it with Half Broke Horses, a novelized account of her grandmother's life. Her siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, all appear here, and all of them got out.