The Glass Castle

On the way back from the UK, I finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

It is heart-renching true story about the author's own childhood experience of being raised by parents who so loathe the confines of traditional society, that they subject Walls and her three siblings to a childhood of unrelenting instability, extreme danger and disgusting poverty.

The story begins with Walls' earliest memory from the age of 3 - while making her own hot dogs for lunch (her mother is too busy painting in the other room, and feels kids should be self-sufficient from that age) her dress catches fire and she suffers from terrible burns on her chest and legs.

Her parents take her to the hospital, where she is thankfully saved from anything more than cosmetic damage, and required to stay for a few months to recover. But 6 weeks later, before her wounds can fully heal, her parents kidnap her from the hospital and make a run for it - technically because they hate these institutions and they think that fresh air is all the child needs to heal, but most likely because they can't be bothered to pay the bills.

And from then onwards, the book summarizes a life so shockingly lacking in anything normal, that it really makes you wonder why people have children if they can't take care of them in the first place; but it also makes you marvel at the resilience and strength of children in the face of adversity.

The Walls' kids are deprived of a home as their parents are constantly on the run from the law, and don't want to hold down jobs. The father is an alcoholic genius, who *can* bring home the bacon when he chooses to not spend it all on booze, and is a wonderful teacher of natural history, mathematics and geology - when he's sober.

The mother is shockingly flighty and spends her entire life complaining that she's stuck raising these children when she really wants to be pursuing her dreams as an artist. What's ironic is that while she keeps saying she's bound by these responsibilities, she actually does nothing to take care of her children.

In one terrible recollection, Walls tells us of a time when the children found their mother hiding away and stuffing herself with chocolate while the children were starving; their mother's defense was that chocolate was her addiction, just like alcohol was their father's. It just boggles the mind that a mother could act in such a way.

The title of the book, The Glass Castle, refers to the pie-in-the-sky project that Walls' father holds as his life-long dream; the reason (read: excuse) for all the running is to make enough money to finance this project. It would be a home made entirely of glass, that would run on solar power and would be the most magnificent invention of all time. Needless to say, this dream never ever comes true.

As a little girl, the author is in awe of her father, loves him deeply and believes in the possibility of the Glass Castle, as well as his rhetoric that their lifestyle is the ideal way to live. But once they move from the deserts of Arizona and California, to disgusting delapidated housing in what is really Hicksville, West Virginia, the children quickly grow up and begin to learn the reality of their parents' weaknesses.

It takes many years of struggle before they are able to escape their parents' chokehold on them, and move to New York one by one to pursue their dreams of a normal life. And the author manages to become especially successful - she is now a celebrity gossip column writer, which she likes because she can show people that everyone has a sad, secret story to their lives. and nobody is perfect.

Apparently the reason Jeannette Walls decided to write the book was that she was riding in a cab going to a party in Manhattan, when she saw a homeless woman digging through the trash and realized with a start - that it was her mother.

Because eventually, the parents followed their kids to New York and officially became homeless, enjoying the freedom and excited by how they could work the system to finance their voluntarily-chosen lifestyle of poverty and aimlessness.

The ovewhelming emotion that you feel after reading this book is anger; anger that such selfish, irresponsible, and dubiously-sane human beings are allowed to bring children into this world, and despite having the means to give them some kind of a happy life, voluntarily choose to sacrifice their happiness and safety as a scapegoat for their own weaknesses and vices. Over and over, I was shocked by the stories.. and each time I thought things couldn't get worse, and the parents couldn't fall any more in my eyes, they managed to actually do it.

But then there is also a message of hope, as one by one, each of the children manages to get out of the vicious circle of poverty and helplessness and make a life of their own. And this underscores something that my own personal experience has made me believe: children, at some level, raise themselves.

While my life has been extremely luxurious compared to the Walls' children, I can relate to their lives through the experience of my own dysfunctional and bitter parents. I know what it feels like to know that your parents have become so involved in their own lives that you have to learn to get by on your own; to know that even though you're a child you have to do most of the parenting in the household; to realize that the best, most wondrous years of your lives were wasted away in a constant struggle for sanity and normalcy, and even today you have little to show for it.

But eventually, you just manage. The madness becomes the everyday, and your perception of "normal" alters dramatically. At the end of the day, you deal with what you've been dealt, and you just simply learn how to make do with what you've got. Doing things any differently - becoming bitter, going off the deep end - would achieve nothing and just mean disappointing yourself. And after being disappointed by the people you love most, you know that that's the last thing you would want to put yourself through. So.. you just manage. That's what children do.