"It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough," dad said. "Because this is not a house for the faint of heart." - Pg 152 is the best description of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.
Jeannette Walls is 1 of 4 children (Lori, Jeannette, Brian & Maureen) born to Rex & Rose Walls. Rex was an alcoholic with great ideas but could not hold on to a job and very often drunk his family into poverty. Rose on the other hand was a creative spirit that loved her children fiercely.
From the start we see that Jeannette is born into a dysfunctional family. The Walls family was always on the move from one town to another. They were constantly running away from debt collectors and the police.
They later moved to Virginia where the family lived in extreme poverty for years. This way, the children learned resilience and how to be on their own.
Rex liked to tell stories and one of them was about the glass castle, a glass house he would build to support his family and finally have a place to call home. And as you read on, you realise that these dreams did not come true.
Jeannette tells her story with authenticity, gripping description and so much rawness.
One Christmas, the father took them out to view the stars and pick out one for themselves because he could not afford Christmas gifts.
Instead of beds, the kids each slept in a big cardboard box. And whenever their dad lost his job, they would go days and months without food, always searching for remains in dumpsters.
How her parents would fight & scream at each other, and then act like nothing happened the next morning. Jeannette tells many stories like these about her family.
The book opens with a 3 year old Jeannette who gets severely burned after her dress caught fire as she was making herself hotdogs. (You guys, 3 years).
She is taken to hospital, something her father Rex later disagrees with. The nurses are concerned and keep asking Jeannette if all is well at home. And according to her, all was well because that's the life she was accustomed to.
Jeannette is later prematurely discharged by her father because they cannot afford the hospital bill. Something he also does when his wife Rose gives birth to Maureen - he referred to it as the "Rex Walls style"
We see that Jeanette and her siblings do not attend school, do not have birth certificates, don’t go to hospitals but rather depend on home remedies and herbs. This is because their father Rex Walls believes that the government is up against the human race and is “evil". So Rex attends church, reads his Bible and leads on his family to preparing for the end of the world because everything else with the system is hell-bent on brainwashing them.
On Jeannette's 10th birthday, her father says she could ask for anything and he would give it - "You know if it's humanly possible I'll get it for you, and if it's not I'll die trying."
"Do you think maybe you could stop drinking?" Jeannette says.
She had lived first hand what it meant to have an alcoholic father. It caused so much pain, doubt and raised questions to everyone around her dad but himself. He seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, and that was going to pull down everyone else with him.
One thing that baffles me about this book is how Jeanette's father showered his children with love and yet was destructive at the same time. How creative and yet insensitive? How on earth could this be one person? And yet with Jeannette's descriptions of him, she still loved him the same.
Rex Walls was so caught up in this illusion of building the glass castle for his family that he missed the present opportunity, the small details of what mattered to them. He traded other things for time with his family, and now they were adults and all they wanted to do was leave.
"If the buses stop running, I’ll hitchhike. I’ll walk if I have to. Go ahead & build the glass castle, but don’t do it for me." Jeannette said.
Side note; If any of you reading this ever gets/finds/lands on/bumps into a hard copy of “The Glass Castle" somewhere on this earth, I’d be very happy to add it to my shelf 😊
