With every turn of the page I was drugged deeper and deeper into Jeannette Walls world. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, took me on a ride of unbelievable emotions that I have never felt from a novel, in the end leaving me to contemplate about her life as well as my own.
The memoir begins with Jeannette as an adult driving in a taxi through New York, when suddenly she sees her mother digging through a trash can on the side of the road. From this many thoughts being to run through Jeannette’s head, mostly related to how embarrassed she felt. In her mind she would lose everything (house, friends, job) if someone would find out who she really was, so a few weeks later she had a talk with her mother. In this conversation Walls tells her mother the feeling she has about her and her past. Jeannette says, “And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?” Her mother’s response, “Just the truth. That’s simple enough”.
The reader is then launched into the story of moving from state to state, as their father searched for gold, never keeping a real job for more than few months. Instead he took to drinking as his full time job, the mother sat at home and painting, insisting she would become a famous artist. Jeannette and her three siblings went without food most of the novel, leading them to wait for children at school to though away food so they could eat lunch as well. Every house that was lived in was a dump, some with no water or electricity, causing them to be dirty most of the time.
From the brief overview of her life one would believe that you would grow to hate Jeannette’s parents. It is only logical. Jeannette’s parents would frequently acquire money, but it would quickly be spend. Towards the end of the novel it is learned that as they leaved in harsh conditions the mother had a piece of land with a value of one million dollars (she refused to sell or live on the land). At the end of the novel it is evident that the struggles that Jeannette and her siblings went through were completely avoidable, their parents just had to put a little work into it. But, I do not hate them; I almost grow to love her parents. Although her mother was completely crazy she made her children strong with the simple advice she gave her children. One example, begin the quote from the beginning, telling her to just tell the truth. Leading her to write the novel. In addition, her father was a drunk that stole and lied to her most of her life, but at his death I cried.
To me it seemed like Walls started her story to tell the world all the hardships she went through, but in the end it was completely different. Instead of feeling sorrow for this woman it was almost like I became her. I could understand why every time her dad stole from her she forgave him. I did want to yell and scream telling her not to go bad to him, but when she did I knew I would have done the same thing. Just like every person in the world, Jeannette’s parents had bad and good qualities. By the end of the book I began to se Wall’s parents as she did. That is just how they are and I except and love them, because for all the bad they have done they still have done some good.
The format that Wall presents her memoir is from age three to the present. With this self-life writing style, I feel that Walls developed her story in a strong way. For instance, starting at a young age we can see the hate that she feels for both her parents, but as the novel develops it slowly disappears. I believe that due to her writing style it made it possible to become Walls in some ways, feeling the emotions that she felt from youth to adulthood. From this the feeling that I developed toward her parents makes scenes. I went through the process of hate to acceptance in the same way Jeannette did herself. In te end allowing me to understand her parents and her way of thinking.
Although this is called a memoir I would relate this story more towards a narrative. The story was very structure and included elements that were interrelated to one another. It also covers almost her entire life, while a memoir only focuses on a portion of someone’s life. Although I believe this book focused more on how she came to terms with how her parents were, I also see this story as a story of strength. Jeanette and her siblings were forced on leaving their parents and they did with constant working and saving. In the end she and her sister even went to college. This is also a story about finding strength from pain.
Comparing this novel with the others that we have read in class so fair, it relates to This Boy’s Life the most. It can be seen that both deal with a hard child hood, but each person dealt with this in different ways. For example, Wolff became a delinquent, while Jeannette had straight A’s. They stories were also written in the same fashion. They were both episodic in how there would be a jump in paragraphs talking about two different events. Although I did not mind this in Wolff’s story, I felt Walls did not achieve this as well as Wolff. For instance, while reading she would bring up a topic that I felt should have been mentioned before. At one part in the story she mentioned that she had been married three year by that time. I was surprised by this and felt like it should have been mentioned in chronological order, but she also might have no spent much time on this because she got a devoice.
After reading this novel I am to a conclusion about my own autobiography. I want to make at least one person feel the way I felt when I read The Glass Castle. With my own story I want to focus on the environment that I group up with as well. Like Walls I would like to have the reader, not feel sorry for me, (because in reality I am where I came from and I would never want to change) I would like them to relate to me, feel what I feel. Just as I felt what Jeannette felt.
