The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

I usually have a little notebook that I write notes in as I read new novels, to remember all the stand-out moments and poignant quotes to discuss. But I felt the strange need to indulge myself into this story wholly undistracted, worried that it would be a huge disservice to turn something so authentic into a short set of bullet points. The Glass Castle is a perfectly paced memoir by Jeannette Walls that has immediately rocketed to the top of my recommendations list, having everything I look for in a perfect read.

At first, I didn’t realise that this book was a memoir, based in reality and not fiction. I say this with the highest praise, for this immersive fiction-like style carried throughout the entire novel. Jeannette starts her story in adulthood, where we get a quick snippet of her life and the relationship she has with her mother; before she reverts back to her earliest childhood memory, aged three, and continuing chronologically from there. I’m so glad that the story began in this way, perfectly encapsulating the complex range of emotions that are threaded in turn throughout the rest of the book: shame, love, guilt, resentment and acceptance. To experience these all at once, in the short space of this first scene allows the reader to unpack how Jeannette came to feel as she goes through a life that is “never boring”.

What is so unique about this story, is Jeannette’s ability to so convincingly write each stage of her life through the voice of a child. The tales are not written with clinical life-lessons and retrospective emotion that could only be told from hindsight's view. Instead, they are fully immersive to the perspective of Jeannette as if she were experiencing them for the first time now. That being said, the memoir does not feel like a chaotic garble of fragmented memories that are chosen at random to recount, each tale is chosen to most authentically represent the stage of life that she was at.

The story is a complex depiction of growing up in loving neglect, every story recounted from the perspective of a child desperate to believe the best in her parent’s irresponsible way of living. The stories are heart-wrenching and devastating but simultaneously never once ask the reader for even a shred of their pity. Jeannette does not want you to hate her erratic and turbulent father who exploited his pre-teen daughter to predatory men in dingy bars in order to earn his keep. She doesn’t want you to scorn a mother that spent her days between her bed and at her easel, sitting on a million-dollar inheritance while her children rifled through the bins at school for food. And even as I write this now, reflecting on the out-right abuse and crimes of Rex and Rose Mary Walls, I can’t help but soften alongside Jeannette at their celebration of the arts, the adventures they played out, their conflict to measure passion and joy with mundaity and responsibility.

Throughout the years of poverty and neglect, Jeannette is her father’s biggest champion. And despite everything that we the reader can see that he has put her through (that Jeannette can't yet), we can’t help but wonder if she would have gotten to the place that she does by the end of the memoir, that she would have had a story to write in the first place, if it weren’t for her parent’s hard to chew life lessons. While reading, I was constantly cycling through the conflicting emotions that Jeannette evokes so fluently in her writing. Never telling the reader how she felt or how her experiences have shaped her, but letting the stories speak for themselves.

Whether it was her early life, bouncing from place to place on ‘The Skedaddle”, sleeping under the seemingly neverending sky in the desert and being gifted a star (or a planet in Jeannette’s case) for Christmas, learning morse code or drafting blueprints for the life-long promised “Glass Castle” that would solve all their problems. Or her early teenage years, sleeping on cardboard bunk beds, being berated for standing up to her perverted uncle, where electricity and heating were a luxury or where her father stole her year-long savings for school to accommodate his taste for liquor. Every single memory is gobsmacking for the most wonderful and tragic reasons. And all that I could think was how I could learn a lesson from Jeannette’s hardiness, her compassion for her parents and her determination to break a cycle which is truly awe-inspiring.

Never before have I been so immersed in a story, desperate for another chapter. Jeannette has the allure of a fantastical storyteller at bedtime, and I was begging my reader for “just one more story!”. It’s brilliantly paced, never lingering too long on a memory that it became overly emotional and ingenuine but perfectly recounting all the concrete details and epic moments of a completely wild life. My friends and I have just started a book-club of sorts, and I cannot wait to cycle this story through them in the hope that they are equally struck by the warmth of this memoir.