GLASS CASTLE
Now adapted into a major film featuring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, and Woody Harrelson, this striking memoir traces one woman's extraordinary journey from the sun-baked, forgotten mining towns of the American Southwest to a well-appointed apartment on New York's Park Avenue. Walls writes about her itinerant upbringing with parents who were, in their way, brilliant, but whose dreams perpetually outpaced their responsibilities, complicated further by her father's alcoholism. It's a childhood full of contradiction: genuine wonder sitting uncomfortably alongside hunger, mishaps, and the occasional flight from the police. At seventeen, she boards a Greyhound bus to New York with her elder sister, determined to build the stable, ordinary life her parents had always treated as something beneath them. Her younger siblings eventually follow. What makes this memoir so absorbing is its emotional honesty. Writing from her apartment, beneath a portrait of a stranger's ancestor, Walls revisits tender memories of gazing at the stars with her father while holding, quite unflinchingly, the harder recollections alongside them. She unpicks feelings of shame, guilt, pity, and quiet pride without ever resolving them into something neat. That refusal to tidy things up is precisely what gives the book its power. Grounded, vivid, and quietly devastating in places, it stays with you long after the final page.
- Author: Jeannette Walls
- Publisher: Virago
- Genre: Industry-Specific Business
- ISBN: 978-1844081820
- Pages: 352 pages