by Jeannette Walls
I'm not sure what I expected from this memoir. I guess I expected it to be like "Angela's Ashes" and it was. Tragic childhood, unimaginable deprivations, deeply flawed parents.
But it also wasn't.
In "Angela's Ashes" the parents were ignorant, superstitious and from a long line of deeply impovrished people. Their tremendous weaknesses as parents were infruiating, puzzling and hard to relate to. The only reason I didn't denounce them as totally worthless is because their abject poverty had them trapped.
In "The Glass Castle" I could totally understand the parents. Alcoholism and a near-pathological self-absorption, pared with brilliant native intelligence, made the characters totally familiar to me. Their personality weakness caused them to choose poverty and drag their children along for the ride.
That was the part that made me crazy. The things they subjected their children to, so incredibly blind to the hardships, was crazy-making. In "Angela's Ashes" the parents knew very well how their children suffered. "The Glass Castle" parents were so egotistical they couldn't see beyond themselves.
In the book the four Walls children are forced to follow their fickle parents around the country, in order to pursue whatever whim struck the mother and father, both brilliant and damaged people. After things get so bad the children steal food out of the garbage at school, they eventually squirrel away money to leave home.
There is no happy ending. The children do well, considering, and the parents continue their very messed up lives with no regret.
What was similiar was the astounding fact that both authors rose beyond their childhood to tremendous success.
What was different was the fact that in "The Glass Castle" the children found many wonderful things about their eclectic upbringing, things they continued to appreciate in adulthood. The same could not be said for "Angela's Ashes."
