Books: THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls

Title: The Glass Castle
Author: Jeannette Walls
Published: 2005
Genre: Memoir

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out of the window and saw Mom rooting through the Dumspter. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks away from the party where I was heading.
Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog, a black-and-white terrier mix, played at her feet.

This is the opening paragraph of Jeannette Walls's book. I read the book a couple of years back  as a book club read, but decided to read it again last week. Let's be honest, some of those book club reads can be very rushed - especially when you realise that 'Oh, oh! Book Club next week and I haven't finished the book.' I felt that a repeat read was needed, and this time at my own pace.

I enjoyed it even more the second time around. The Glass Castle is a memoir about growing up in a rootless, sometimes homeless family. Jeannette Walls's story is told in an objective, distanced manner. I found it amazing that throughout the entire book, there's no blame or judgement - just a simple telling of a childhood very different from the conventional.

Her alcoholic father and artistic mother raise Jeanette and her three siblings in various places in  the American south from a trailer park in southern Arizona, to a normal house in Phoenix, to a dilapidated, rundown home in Welch, West Virginia. The story is about a dysfunctional family, with a hard-drinking father who cannot hold down a job; a qualified teacher mother who chooses not to work because it is disruptive to her work as an artist and children who are left to fend for themselves most of the time.

What made this book a fascinating read for me was that the homelessness and poverty that the family lives in is a choice the parents make. The mother inherits a house from her mother in Phoenix, which is where the family lives for a while - a time that was probably the most stable for the family- but the restlessness kicks in and soon the father uproots them, telling that they're getting soft in Phoenix. They stay in motels, when they have money, sleep in their car, and even out in the open desert along the way on their many adventures. What is clear is that their parents do love them. They arm them with a love for books and knowledge and send them to school in whichever small town they settle in, but when it comes to putting food on the table on a regular basis, this is where they fail their children. Jeannette and her siblings raise themselves - eating from the school dustbins at school, foraging in the trash bins in their neighbourhood and as they get older, getting jobs to earn money and feed themselves. The Walls family stayed in Welch, a coal mining town, for the longest time - and it is from here where the children spent the remainder of their childhoods before moving, one at a time, to New York to forge new, more conventional lives for themselves.

The author recounts her childhood with a neutral voice, even when telling of sleeping in a house that rained in, having to eat butter for dinner whilst their mother hid chocolate from them and ate it on the sly, and having to go weeks without a bath because their family house did not have running water. Throughout the book, she writes affectionately about her father and his wild ideas, and sense of adventure he gave them, and humourously about her mother and free-spirited, non-conformist ways. She acknowledges the irresponsibility of both when it came to their family, but there is no recrimination or bitterness in her narrative.

It reminded me of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes; the difference being that that the Walls family is more nomadic and dynamic, and the book has a less depressive tone.
I have just added Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs to my reading list, which too is in the same genre, with the similar theme of an unconventional, slightly bizarre childhood.