People Who Live In Glass Houses Book: The Glass Castle
Author: Jeanette Walls
I used to read on my commute to work everyday. When your choices are to watch people pick their noses and eat their boogeys first thing in the morning on the N train or bury your own nose in a book, it seems like a no-brainer.
That's another thing about unemployment, though-- I don't have a commute, so my usual reading time is gone and replaced by sleeping in. That said, a book has got to be pretty good to get me to turn off Real Chance at Love 3 and read instead.
The Glass Castle had been sitting on my desk at work for weeks, lent to me by my adorable coworker Annie. She was about the seventieteenth person to recommend it to me, but she had even go so far as to lend me a copy (which, I sadly report, was ruined by a rogue wave at the beach one day this summer. It's still readable, but the pages are warped and wavy, and Annie, if you're reading this, it's not really...returnable. If you were a library, you'd probably charge me for it. But remember, friend, I am unemployed).
When it comes to memoirs, I am often skeptical. The first autobiography I read was about Beaverly Cleary, author of my beloved Ramona series, and I took every word as fact. But memoirs-- they're a horse of a different color. Technically fact that's muddied by the fiction of our memories, a memoir can never really be trusted. And somewhere along the way, fiction became passe- why imagine a world when you can just write about the one you lived in? Just remember to make it better than it actually was-- more compelling.
As expected, memoirs got more and more horrifying in order to sell, to become the next "amazing story." (Remember when Augusten Burroughs describes watching the family dog lick a three year old's erect penis? Really? You don't remember? Then you must not have read Running With Scissors because frankly if you had read something like that, you'd never forget it.) I never read A Million Little Pieces, but I think I love Oprah so much that I am mistrustful of memoirs now on her behalf.
I finally picked up The Glass Castle from my nightstand around week four of unemployment, when monsoon season in Brooklyn was in full swing, my apartment had been cleaned to within an inch of its life, and I was starting to look like I was juicing from going to the gym so much. Basically, I started reading again because I literally had nothing else to do.
Written by Jeanette Walls about her impoverished childhood spent traveling around the country in search of wealth/fleeing the authorities, this memoir is less about the horrors of her childhood (of which there are many) and more about the rich characters in her life-- namely her parents--and how the careless decisions they made dramatically shaped their childrens' lives. Her father, painted as a raging alcoholic with white-trash-Elvis charm actually comes off as lovable while at the same time infuriating. Her mother, who gets fatter on hidden chocolates as Jeanette and her siblings steal unfinished lunches from the trash at school to keep from starving, is equally maddening to the point where you just want to reach in the book and shake her. They were two incredibly fascinating characters who managed to not evolve even an iota throughout the story.
The opening scene involves an adult Jeanette seeing her mother on a New York City street diving in a dumpster, and while part of me didn't really care how she got there, I was fascinated by how Jeanette had gotten in the taxi that was passing her by. How had she grown up to not be like her parents? And how had she forgiven them enough to write a book about it?
Therein lies the real heart of the story for me. Where her parents lack any growth, Jeanette slowly realizes-- in the most heartbreaking way-- that her father's stories of impending riches and great inventions are all just pie-in-the-sky talk, and her mother is not a misunderstood artist but rather a self-centered and sick woman. This realization provokes Jeanette's own character evolution. When she and her brother dig out the foundation for the title's "glass castle"-- the solar-powered home their father has been promising to build to replace the ramshakle residences they move from and to-- her father instructs them to fill it with the family's trash, and overnight Jeanette realizes that she has to become the parents to her older and younger siblings, because the parents they have are pretty much useless. Lovable, but fucking useless. If you believe The Glass Castle as it's written, her siblings owe it to her own motivation for getting them out of coal country and to New York City, and essentially saving their lives.
As awful as Jeanette's parents are, I found myself really liking them. I think that's the real beauty of this book, and one reason I loved it. Walls acknowledges that things are not just black and white, people are not either good or bad, but shades of everything. There are no certainties, and no easy answers-- which means there's no one to blame, either. It is what it is, and life is what we choose to make of it.
Overall, an excellent book. And way better than Real Chance at Love 3.
Recommended in every category: commuter special, beach read and lazy Sundays on the couch.
PS- Want me to review a book? Tell me in the comments, and I'll put it on my list!
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