A review by philantrop
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

challenging dark sad medium-paced

3.0

I’ve had a hard time reading “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls. Walls describes the horrors (and a few good times, few and far between) of her childhood and adolescence.

While I kept wishing someone had intervened, I still felt thoroughly disengaged from the memoir. Walls describes everything without allowing any emotions to shine through. “Glass Castle” reads like it has been written by a detached observer. It’s a sterile, antiseptic report, which is undoubtedly well-written but, to me, not very interesting.

Only during the very first chapter are there any meaningful emotional components and in her acknowledgements, Walls states being “grateful [...] to my father, Rex S. Walls, for dreaming all those big dreams”. These are the dreams of a man who repeatedly tried to sell his own daughter to strangers to rape her. Moreover, he goes on to victim-blame her.

Walls is also grateful to her mother “for believing in art and truth” - a truth her mother gaslit her children away from, and a truth that includes possession of land worth a million that’s being kept in the family for no reason at all while the kids literally starve, freeze, and suffer from neglect, among other hardships.

Don’t get me wrong: Walls, just like anyone else, is, of course, welcome to feel and think any way she likes. Nevertheless, what precedent does that set for other parents like hers?

In different ways, I have my own childhood traumas caused by my father (and was blamed for them by my mother). I breathe more freely since his death in August 2024. Hadn’t it been for the misplaced piety of others, I would have had him dumped into my mother’s grave, alone with an undertaker.

Three stars out of five for the effort.