REVIEW: The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls' memoir is a remarkable portrait of a family living on the edge of insanity and starvation. Walls' parents can't cope, they can't care for their children properly, they can't even seem to get any kind of grasp on reality. Walls' mother is a brilliant woman who is willing to sacrifice everything, even the health of her children, for her non-existent "art career." She paints all the time, and rarely works, even as her children are rooting through garbage for food. Walls' father is no better. Also intellectually gifted, he's a raging alcoholic, a man who drinks to forget his considerable demons, and though he clearly loves his children, he just can't keep it together to provide for them. This is pure human tragedy on a Shakespearean scale.

As I read this book, I vacillated between despising Walls' crazy parents, and wanting to love them. One passage made me range through those two emotions almost simultaneously. Jeannette's father decides one day to prove to his family that wild animals aren't dangerous so long as you know how to handle them. So he brings them to the zoo, and sneaks right up to the cheetah cage. The animal is curious about him, and approaches until the two are practically nose to nose. Then Jeannette's father reaches into the cage and pets the cheetah. Little Jeannette, who is somewhere around ten years old, sees this, and wants to pet the cheetah too. Her father shocks the crowd that has gathered around him by allowing her:

Dad took my hand and slowly guided it to the side of the cheetah's neck. It was soft but also bristly. The cheetah turned his head and put his moist nose up against my hand. Then his big pink tongue unfolded from his mouth, and he licked my hand. I gasped. Dad opened my hand and held my fingers back. The cheetah licked my palm, his tongue warm and rough, like sandpaper dipped in hot water. I felt all tingly...

There was a small crowd around the cage now, and one particularly frantic woman grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me over the chain. "It's all right," I told her. "My dad does stuff like this all the time."

...I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah.

No sane parent would allow his little girl to approach a wild predator. When I read this passage I despised Jeannette's father for endangering his daughter this way, but I could understand why his daughter loved him for giving her this amazing experience. This passage is a great illustration of the kind of parenting Walls and her siblings received. They were plunged into successive high risk situations, some of them wonderful, some of them horrifying. How she and her siblings survived, and learned to thrive, is a story of true courage, and true love.

I suspect readers have a range of reactions to this memoir, but they probably fall into one of two camps. Some of us will finish the book and thank our lucky stars that our parents were sane enough to keep us fed and clothed, and that they protected us. We might even be able to overlook our issues long enough to admit for a minute that, yeah, Mom and Dad weren't perfect, but they did a pretty good job. The other type of reader will finish this book and think, maybe for the first time, that they're not the only ones with crazy parents who neglected them, endangered them, and used them. They'll find themselves feeling a little less ashamed about their pasts. This book could help a lot of emotionally scarred people to move on.

The Glass Castle is a hard book emotionally, but considering the amazing heroism of the Walls children, and their courage in the face of adversity, I think it is a great book for teens to read, especially kids whose family life might not be what they deserve. Not everyone will agree with me. They might think that teen readers should be protected from such harsh realities, but I don't agree that kids need to be protected from books. On the contrary, I think books protect kids. When kids learn about the realities of the world, they're more prepared to deal with them. Kids shouldn't have their hands placed inside a cheetah cage, and they shouldn't be left with an abusive grandmother, but they should be allowed to read about these risky situations. Because when kids read about resilient, courageous children dealing with very real threats, it helps them learn to be resilient and courageous themselves.

If you read The Glass Castle for no other reason, read it for the beautiful writing. Walls is a true master of language and storytelling, and reading this book is a good education for writers and readers alike.