Recommendations
Books Like The Glass Castle
Best books to read after The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle holds love and neglect in the same hand without resolving the contradiction. These 8 books share its portrayal of complicated family loyalty, its unflinching account of childhood in poverty, and its examination of what we owe the people who damaged us.
- 1Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's 2018 memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and teaching herself to a Cambridge PhD is the closest parallel to The Glass Castle in contemporary memoir — both books are about escaping an extreme upbringing without fully abandoning the love for the family that made it extreme, and both became major bestsellers for the same reasons.
- 2Buy
The Liar's Club
by Mary Karr
Karr's 1995 memoir — one of the foundational works of contemporary literary memoir — about growing up in an East Texas oil town with a volatile mother and a family defined by secrets is the most important predecessor to The Glass Castle: the same dark humor applied to genuine childhood chaos, the same complicated love for a parent who cannot take care of you.
- 3Buy
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 memoir about growing up in desperate poverty in Limerick, Ireland — with an alcoholic father whose charm and storytelling cannot make up for his inability to keep his family fed — is the most celebrated account of childhood poverty and parental failure in the memoir tradition, and the standard against which The Glass Castle is often measured.
- 4Buy
Hillbilly Elegy
by J.D. Vance
Vance's 2016 memoir about growing up in an Appalachian family defined by poverty, addiction, and cultural dysfunction parallels The Glass Castle in its geographic and socioeconomic territory — both books are about children of the white working poor who escape into education and professional success and then turn back to understand the family and culture they came from.
- 5Buy
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs's 2002 memoir about being given away by his mother to her psychiatrist's chaotic household uses the same dark humor as The Glass Castle to approach a genuinely disturbing childhood — both books are funnier than they have any right to be, and both use that humor to keep the reader inside an experience that would otherwise be too painful to follow.
- 6Buy
Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart
Stuart's 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel — about a boy in 1980s Glasgow devoted to his alcoholic mother — extends the territory of The Glass Castle into fiction: the same relationship between a child's love and a parent's incapacity, the same portrait of a specific kind of poverty (post-industrial working class), and the same refusal to make the parent simply a villain.
- 7Buy
Half Broke Horses
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 2009 'true-life novel' about her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith — a teacher, rancher, and horse trainer in early twentieth-century New Mexico and Arizona — is the direct companion volume to The Glass Castle, filling in the family history that produced Rex and Rose Mary Walls and showing where some of the family's wildness came from.
- 8Buy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Smith's 1943 novel — about Francie Nolan growing up in poverty in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century, with a charming alcoholic father and a fiercely practical mother — is the most beloved fictional predecessor to The Glass Castle: the same portrait of a childhood in genuine poverty, the same complicated father-daughter love, the same insistence that poverty is specific and textured rather than merely unfortunate.
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