The Glass Castle
Subtitle: A Memoir
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780743247542
Subjects: Entertainment & Performing Arts - Television Personalities; Women; Personal Memoirs; Childhood Memoir; Alcohol Abuse; Family Development; United States; Biography & Autobiography; Biography / Autobiography; Literary; Biography/Autobiography; Children of alcoholics; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; Problem families; Welch; West Virginia; Biography; Case studies
First sentence: I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
Description: The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.
The Glass Castle is truly astonishing -- a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.