When I find time to sit down and read a book, it is very rare that I can actually find one that pulls me in and is hard to put down. There are some books that I have to take everywhere so I can read at every spare moment I get.
The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, was an example of one of these extraordinary books that I fell in love with.
This book was brilliantly written, with personal stories following the author’s life and struggles with her alcoholic father, Rex Walls, her mother, Rose Mary Walls, a free-spirited aspiring artist, who drag their children across the country throughout their childhood without enough money to support their family, or even a permanent home.
One night, when Walls was only four years old, her father pulled her and her siblings out of bed and told them that they were getting away from the trailer park they were living in, their destination was unknown.
So from there on out, the family was doing what the author describes as “the skedaddle,” constantly moving from place to place, living in little towns every once in awhile.
Walls also had three siblings, Lori, the oldest, Brian, a year younger than her, and Maureen, the youngest of all the children. Throughout the story, the children had to learn to cope with the struggles in their life without a proper home or enough money. She speaks of how they were able to count on each other to withstand their circumstances and the treatment from the parental figures in their lives.
The book itself follows the author’s life from the time she was a young child, with stories starting from the time she was three or four years old, until the time she reached adulthood and was able to set off to find a new life and become successful without her parents.
As the story progresses, Walls and her siblings grow and mature and come to new realizations about their situation and their rough lives. But one of the most important aspects and recurring ideas in this book was the father figure in her life and their connection.
Walls was always favored by her father, and he always pushed her to be strong and take after him. And although he was a heavy drinker treated the family poorly as a result, she still forgave him and tried to make him stop drinking for her and the family.
One of the symbols of the way her father treated the family was the glass castle. Rex Walls promised his children that when they finally had enough money, he would build a dream castle made of glass for them to live in. But he was never successful enough with this goal and let the family down.
The way Rex Walls let his family down and made all of their lives so hard by dragging them across the country, allowing his alcohol problem to consume his life, and never working hard enough for his children and wife to hold a steady job and earn them enough money to live off of is prominent and a key part of Walls’s life and memoir.
In my opinion, the most inspiring part of the story is Walls’s success in the end when she moves to New York, finds a good job, and gets into Barnard College. She lived such a hard life and up until that point, it was questionable if those children were going to get out of the hole their father had dug for them and cope with the grief of these tragic memories. But she and two of her siblings are able to follow their dreams in the end and become successful living their own lives without their parents.
Walls uses her outcome and success to inspire readers and emphasize the true reason hardships are faced in life. She conveys the idea that no matter how hard one may have to try to get there, or how tough the situation may be, anyone can find the determination and drive to push through and land where they want to be. That was a message that truly stuck with me.
So besides the fact that this book was hard to put down, it was also the deeper meaning that reached me and made me fall in love with the story. If anyone is looking for a novel that they will enjoy reading and emotionally connect to, then this is the perfect book to read.