the glass castle

Last night, I finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. One of my previous English students recommended it to me, and I'm SO glad that she did! If you're planning on reading the book, don't read this post.

This book is a memoir of the author's early life. Her parents were dreamers -- intelligent, creative, people -- who were never able to realize their dreams. Her mother wanted to be an artist and a writer, but was never able to make any money selling her paintings and never published any of her stories or books. Her father became an alcoholic and was never able to keep a job for long, more because of his discontent and anti-authority/establishment ideas than because of alcohol. Jeannette grew up going hungry much of the time because her parents wasted what little money they earned and were too proud to sign up for any kind of welfare. The family, two parents and four children, lived in shacks or sometimes outside or in their car if they had one. Finally, one by one, each of the four children moved to New York City to go to college, get jobs, and make better lives for themselves without their parents. The parents became homeless, living on the streets of New York and later living in an abandoned building. The author discovered the irony of the entire situation when her uncle died. Her mother came to her to ask her to buy her uncle's land in Texas because she felt very strongly about keeping family land in the family. She had an identical "plot" of land adjacent to her recently deceased brother's. When Jeannette asked her mother how much she thought it would cost, the answer was a million dollars. All of those years, her mother owned property worth a million dollars but allowed her children to grow up dirty, hungry, and reviled by most of the people who knew them. I suppose the saying "all's well that ends well" would apply to this woman's story because she ended up making a good life for herself, as did her brother and sisters; but the incredible torment she had to endure for the first eighteen years of her life makes it very difficult to use that quote. No child should be neglected as these children were, and no parent should be as completely self-absorbed as these two people were.