By Kaitlin Lyle
“The Glass Castle” reads as a brilliant portrait of a family’s loyalty to one another as well as of a writer’s search for liberation. The voice that speaks throughout this memoir is articulated as one of a remarkable woman who has endured much in keeping herself secret, and yet a candid innocence is retained in telling her story as observed through the eyes of a child.
The account begins with journalist Jeannette Walls heading by taxi to a party when she spies a disheveled woman rooting through a Dumpster. While most people in New York would have automatically assumed her to be an anonymous member of the homeless, Walls instantly recognizes the woman as her own mother. In her shame, Jeannette returns to her home on Park Avenue to reflect on the past she’s struggled to keep separate from the life she now lives. After admitting this to her mother later on, she is advised to “just tell the truth”. In this day and age, it’s rare to find an instance where those four words succeed in uncovering an astonishing narrative such as this, especially when the story itself has been a part of someone’s life so carefully hidden until now.
From her first memory of catching fire at age three to her newfound life in New York, it stands to reason that Ms. Walls’s life has been nothing short of being truly spectacular. In having moved to various locations throughout the South- including Phoenix, Battle Mountain, and Welch- alongside her sisters and brother, an elaborate bundle of family memories has accumulated over time, each laced with joy or struggle alike.
At the head of the family rests the vibrant, if not peculiar, duo that is the Walls family’s parents. As is described in several passages within the memoir, father Rex Walls was a charismatic story-teller who encouraged his children to find adventure and educated them on the surrounding universe. One of Rex’s most memorable plans was to build the Glass Castle: a desert home for the family constructed entirely out of glass with solar energy and a water-purification system. Despite the chaos created by Walls’ father, this memory relays as a personification of hope throughout her adolescence to the point that it now hold a permanent embodiment as the memoir’s title.
Conversely, there were incidents in Walls’ childhood in which the peculiar family escapades often collided with the destructive force that was her father’s alcoholism.
By the same token, her mother Rose Mary was a self-proclaimed artist who frequently shrugged off domestic responsibilities, leaving the four children to take care of themselves. In turn, Walls and her siblings banded together to find hope in life’s unpredictable turns; as they got older, each of them strived in their belief that happiness lied beyond their chaotic family, eventually leaving for a better life in New York. As Lori, Brian, Jeannette, and Maureen found success in their newfound lifestyles, their parents were facing a poverty-stricken existence by their own choice, later deciding to trail their children to the city.
Each memory that Walls has chosen to unveil refuses to embellish in its details, instead following her mother’s counsel in honesty, whether the stories be happy or heartwrenching. In spite of their eccentric natures and the habits that pitted the family against each other, as author to her story, Jeannette faces the facts head-on in her writing while maintaining an undying love for the family she grew up with.