"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls is a woman whose early life was very different from most of us in a large number of ways. First of all, her parents Rex and Rose Mary had three other children, and during Jeannette’s early years the family lived as nomads, traveling from desert towns to mountain camps. 

Rex was a very brilliant man who taught his children a variety of different things such as physics and geology, as well as how one should embrace life without fears. Rose Mary was a painter, and contrarily to Rex she did not take well to being a provider for the family, referring to herself as being an “excitement addict”.

However, at some point the money ran out as well as the desire to keep on living like fugitives, and so the family settled into a West Virginia mining town where the family troubles truly began to show. Rex’s alcohol habits started to become harder and harder to please as he did everything in his power to escape his reality, which included stealing grocery money and disappearing for days on end. 

On her end, Rose Mary would bear little interest in the lives of her children, feeling as if they are holding her back. This left Jeannette as well as her brothers and sisters to fend for themselves and make it through this world, until one day they finally got enough resources to leave their home.

For a long time widely-acclaimed author Jeannette Walls has been hiding her roots to the best of her abilities. The Glass Castle is basically her telling the story she has been trying to keep under wraps for many years now.

Apart from offering simply a series of descriptive statements about her life, she truly reflects on the people she met and the events she had been through offering some very valuable insight not only into her life, but also into human nature in general.

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Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls is a former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and a reputed American author whose magnum opus (so far at least) turned out to be The Glass Castle, a memoir of her own childhood. It sold over 2.7 million copies and has received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association's Alex Award, as well as the Books for Better Living Award. Her fascination with reminiscing of the past didn't end there, as she came back in 2009 in full force to publish Half Broken Horses, based on her grandmother's life.