A haunting and exceptionally well-told true story, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls chronicles her poverty-stricken childhood, where she and her siblings struggle to survive despite their alcoholic father and crazy mother.
For Jeannette's entire childhood, the family lives as squatters in tiny, hole-in-the-wall dwellings. As children, their beds were cardboard refrigerator boxes. As teenagers, their father crafted bunkbeds out of stolen two-by-fours and rope, and laid down cardboard for mattresses. Her brother fights off drunken intruders, and at age three, Jeannette is severely burned while cooking her own lunch. Her parents refuse to get jobs, clean house, do laundry, or buy groceries. Her father lives at the bar; her mother cries in bed or spends every available penny on art supplies because she's "an artist." Although the mother has a teaching degree and often lands a new job, her children make her get out of bed to go, they write her lesson plans, and grade her papers for her. As seven year olds. The dad is of course going to strike it rich any day by finding gold with his homemade metal detector, thereby allowing them to build a beautiful castle with glass walls and a magical glass staircase.
Later, they live in a condemned building. The stairs have rotted so they have to enter the unheated house by climbing in the back window. When the outhouse overflows downstairs and sewage runs everywhere, the children beg their mother to "do something." She buys them a bucket and puts it in the kitchen. When Jeannette complains that the only thing to eat in the house is ham with maggots, her mother says, "Cut the maggots off and stop being so picky." The most mind-boggling line of all was when the perfectly able-bodied mother looked at her starving children and said, "It's not my fault if you're hungry." Very quickly they learned to steal lunch from garbages at school and dumpsters around town. It was their only meal each day.
Eventually, with lots of pluck, hard work, and lying about their ages, each child leaves home for the endless opportunities of New York City to start a new life. After the oldest daughter leaves, the others, still children, quickly follow. They work to earn money and finish raising themselves. A few years later the parents follow them and live on the streets in New York because, the mother says, "they make it so easy to be homeless here."
I can't imagine a life of refusing the responsibilities of adulthood and watching while your children literally claw around for an existence. So reminiscent of Angela's Ashes with it's wonderful storytelling and astonishing details, this is a book I will remember for a long time.
