Recommendations
Books Like The Glass Castle
Best books to read after The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle is the memoir of a nomadic, impoverished childhood with charismatic, deeply irresponsible parents, told without bitterness — one of the best-selling memoirs of the 2000s. These 8 books extend into dysfunctional family memoir, poverty, the literature of resilience, and the craft of personal narrative.
- 1
Buy on AmazonEducated
by Tara Westover
Westover's memoir of escaping an isolated, survivalist Idaho family — the closest modern parallel to The Glass Castle, involving a brilliant, irresponsible father who endangers his children, a passive mother, and a daughter who escapes through education.
- 2
Buy on AmazonBorn a Crime
by Trevor Noah
Noah's memoir of his unconventional childhood in South Africa — another account of loving, remarkable, and deeply flawed parents navigated with humor and without bitterness, with the same quality of making the extraordinary feel intimate.
- 3Buy on Amazon
A Child Called It
by Dave Pelzer
Pelzer's account of severe childhood abuse by his mother — the most extreme end of the dysfunctional-family memoir spectrum, providing the context that helps readers understand where The Glass Castle fits on the continuum between neglect, eccentricity, and abuse.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Hillbilly Elegy
by J.D. Vance
Vance's memoir of growing up in Appalachian poverty with a drug-addicted mother and a family culture of chaos and violence — the sociological and economic context for the rural poverty that the Walls family inhabited in West Virginia.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
Mary Karr's memoir of her volatile, alcoholic parents in a small Texas oil town in the 1960s — the literary ancestor of The Glass Castle's approach to the dysfunctional-family memoir: deeply affectionate, utterly clear-eyed, and beautifully written.
- 6
Buy on AmazonAngela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of growing up in abject poverty in Limerick, Ireland — the classic of the poverty-childhood genre that The Glass Castle belongs to, told with the same dark humor and the same refusal to wallow in self-pity.
- 7
Buy on AmazonHalf Broke Horses
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 'true life novel' about her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith — the woman who raised Rose Mary, the mother of The Glass Castle — told in first person, providing the generational backstory for the unconventional family Walls grew up in.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
Díaz's novel about a Dominican American family across generations — the fictional counterpart to The Glass Castle's portrait of family mythology, inherited dysfunction, and the weight of the past on the present, written with equal humor and emotional honesty.
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