I finally got around to reading this innocent looking memoir by Jeannette Walls called THE GLASS CASTLE and I couldn’t put it down until the whole thing was read. Afterwards, I had to look up everything I could about the author. I can give you a tiny idea of what it’s
all about, but you just won’t get it until you start to read it. Someone also told me about it, and I thought, "oh that sounds kinda interesting." Little did I know.
It’s not your typical story of poverty and the hard luck life. It’s not just the arrangement of words either. This is a child’s life, written by her adult self in a straightforward, uncompromising, yet unjudgemental manner. The fact that it is not judgemental is part of the astonishment of this book.
The author was a successful journalist and writer for magazines
such as The New Yorker, and a Hollywood Gossip columnist, who worried about the effect that this book of her upbringing would have on her toney Park Avenue friends, who had no idea of her more than intimate acqaintance with the wrong side of the tracks. I hear that it is going to be made into a film, but read this book first, as it is the true voice of the author. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Here are some excerpts:
"We moved around like nomads. We lived in dusty little mining towns in Nevada, Arizona, and California. They were usually nothing but a tiny cluster of sad, sunken shacks, a gas station, a dry-goods store, and a bar or two. They had names like Needles and Bouse, Pie, Goffs, and Why, and they were near places like the Superstition Mountains, the dried-up Soda Lake, and the Old Woman Mountain. The more desolate and isolated a place was, the better Mom and Dad liked it......Some of the people who lived in these towns had been there for years. Others were rootless, like us--just passing through. They were gamblers or ex-cons or war veterans or what Mom called loose women. There were old prospectors, their faces wrinkled and brown from the sun, like dried-up apples. The kids were lean and hard, with calluses on their hands and feet. We’d make freinds with them, but not close friends, because we knew we’d be moving on sooner or later.
We might enroll in school, but not always. Mom and Dad did most of our teaching. Mom had us all reading books without pictures by the time we were five, and Dad taught us math. He also taught us the things that were really important and useful, like how to tap out Morse code and how we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us. He showed us how to aim and fire his pistol, how to shoot Mom’s bow and arrows, and how to throw a knife by the blade so that it landed in the middle of a target with a satisfying thwock. By the time I was four, I was pretty good with Dad’s pistol....
We fought a lot in Welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe because there was so little to do in Welch;maybe it was because life there was hard and it made people hard; maybe it was because of all the bloody battles over unionizing the mines; maybe because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods, and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it our on their kids, who took it out on other kids. Whatever, the reason, it seemed that just about everyone in Welch--men, women, boys, girls--liked to fight....
When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. They called me spider legs, skelton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick woman, bean pole, and giraffe, and they said I could stay dry in the rain by standing under a telephone wire.
At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought their hot meals, Brian and I would get out our books and read. Brian told everyone he had to keep his weight down because he wanted to join the wrestling team when he got to high school. I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour. I’d stay in one of the stalls with the door locked and my feet propped up so that no one would recognize my shoes.
When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs; packages of peanut butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in the cheese. I’d return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds....."
The world of children is not a safe world. Sadly, most adults don’t wish to deal with this reality and continue to perpetuate the myth of: The Happy Hollisters: Nuclear Family! Books like this should open our minds to the fact that there are many more stories like this out in the greater world, stories that won’t be heard because the children didn’t grow up to become gifted writers such as Jeannette Walls.
-----teresa