The Glass Castle
By Jeannette Walls
Published January 9, 2006 (Paperback) Scribner
I love books best when they’re new. The pages are smooth and unused. And, I love them when they’re hardcover, and the books are so new that the pub date is after I’ve received the books in the mail.
When I recently received Jeannette Walls’ brand new book Half Broke Horses, I realized my procrastinating was over. I would have to face — again — whatever reading her four-year old book The Glass Castle stirred up. That’s what brilliant memoirs do — they target the universal pain and joy of being human.
Thing is, lots of people have recommended The Glass Castle to me because my story reminded them of hers. So today I read it.
The professional me found Walls’ writing strong, elegant, and beautifully capable of communicating difficult truth without a nuance of selfish whining. Pure. A journalist recording what happened without commentary.
The personal me fought back huge gasping sobs – for the little girl she was, the little girl I was, for every little girl and boy who has been abused and neglected…and grows up accepting that life as the truth. There is so much, so very much, in her book, that, hours after I read it, the resulting emotions are still ping-ponging through me.
Our surface lives don’t match up. She grew up in Appalachia, and headed for New York at her earliest chance. I grew up in New York, and fled my family, moving south to the University of Florida. But our experiences are, as my friends suspected, eerily similar.
As a toddler, she was cooking hot dogs on the stove, her mother outside, and little Jeannette’s pretty pink dress caught fire. Her torso was severely burned. As a toddler, I was sucking on a frozen hot dog, telling my babysitter that I was “practicing.” Within my torso, my organs were displaced by what my stepfather did, my mother somehow not protecting me from him.
I read The Glass Castle, feeling anguish for Jeannette, as she forced herself to be strong enough to be her own mother and father. It finally dawned on me after I finished reading the book, that I had the same legacy. You accept what is, and push through…or die. We both found ourselves writing for the school paper in high school. The ticket out.
She wrote how her father called her his favorite, out of the four kids. My real father called me his favorite, and he vanished forever when I was six – after being at the wrong end of my stepfather’s fist. And my stepfather called me his favorite. But that cost me my childhood, my innocence, my virginity. I looked like a small version of my mother. Prettier, he said, like Elizabeth Taylor, and my ass was prettier than my mom’s flat butt. He favored me over my younger brother and sister. The three of us kids never shared our secrets, like Jeannette and her sibs did. We were afraid of our stepfather’s violence. Her dad was a drunk who never could hold a job for long, and the family suffered hunger more times than I could count. My mother was the drunk, but an accomplished one – she ran a nursery school, and later a travel agency.
Her parents stayed together — moving to New York City, and becoming homeless there. Her father said he couldn’t live with her mother, and he couldn’t live without her. And my mother and stepfather stayed together. He often said “We fought so well on stage, we decided to get married and make it permanent.” And they did.
What a legacy. What a waste of lives. And for the children, it’s a crapshoot whether they’ll thrive because of the stress, pain, and trauma — or whether they’ll go nuts. Jeannette and I are among the lucky ones. We read of other lives, dreamed bigger dreams, fought the limits that were issued like marching orders by our authority figures, and got the hell out.
Then we write about it, so the little girls and little boys inside the adult bodies will recognize the story, and step away from the old debilitating family secrets that will crush them, if not divulged…and they will know that they, too, can be healed.
