Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.
Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.
In terms of subject matter, The Glass Castle doesn’t do anything new. Walls isn’t the first writer to survive and draw from an impoverished childhood and she won’t be the last. Yet while she doesn’t deliver with the brio of some of the genre’s heavyweights, she doesn’t overreach, either. Under-writing where others might have become overwrought, she succeeds in delivering a resonant, polished memoir that is neither sentimental nor heavy-handed.
The earlier chapters especially benefit from this lightness of touch. Rather than retell her childhood in an adult voice, or worse yet in a child’s voice stained with her own grown-up judgement, she describes events and her reactions as she saw and felt at the time. And so it is that after tumbling unnoticed out of a speeding car and left crying on the roadside, a five-year-old Walls finds hilarity in her father’s description of her bleeding nose — her ‘snot locker’ — rather than upset at her near-abandonment. As an reader, I appreciate this: the section is far more unsettling and its effect is more poignant than it would have been had the adult Walls judged or interpreted on my behalf.
Walls’ father repeatedly jettisons her into situations beyond her control, batting away protests with the assurance that he wouldn’t drop her into anything she couldn’t handle. The way she processes these experiences changes as she develops a sense of responsibility for herself. At seven, half-drowned after learning to swim the Rex Walls way, she accepts his logic; at thirteen, tossed to a pack of drunken rednecks, she isn’t so sure.
A perpetual outsider, the young Walls believed her survival depended not just on being part of the rapidly unravelling family unit, but on holding it together. She writes of how a group of neighbourhood children attacked her and her brother Brian, bragging about seeing the pigsty where the Walls kids lived. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Walls siblings fight back, defending a home and family they believe in less and less.
As the years pass and the Walls children become more capable, their parents detach almost completely from responsibility and, eventually, reality. Walls’ eventual exodus to New York City is both her greatest coup and her lowest ebb: it is the thing she does after all her other efforts have failed. It works, but it just about kills her to do it.
Technically a memoir and literally a story of survival, thematically The Glass Castle is very much about the politics of self-preservation. The author is brutally honest about the consequences of her escape — the rationalisation of choosing herself over her parents, and the guilt and shame that come with surviving what others did not.
This book is the result of Walls’ working-through and it reads as an atonement of sorts — an attempt at telling the whole story, and in doing so, fusing who she was, and who she really is, with who she became. It’s not high art, and it’s not the best memoir you’ll ever read. But there’s an honesty here that a lot of memoirs lack, a heartbroken sense of defense, as though Walls is saying, I did the best I could, but in the end, I had to choose me.
Possibly related posts: