Recommendations
Books Like The Glass Castle
Best books to read after The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle is the memoir of a chaotic, impoverished childhood with brilliant, irresponsible parents — and the escape to a self-made life. These recommendations explore the dysfunction memoir tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about a childhood that should not have produced the adult it produced, and the will that made the difference.
- 1Buy
Half Broke Horses
by Jeannette Walls
The companion Walls book — the story of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith, a rancher, teacher, and rodeo rider; written in 'true-life novel' form and the essential companion for readers who want to understand where the Walls family story begins.
- 2Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
The closest contemporary parallel — Westover growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho without formal schooling, escaping to earn a Cambridge PhD; the memoir that most directly parallels The Glass Castle's arc of a chaotic, unsupported childhood overcome by determination and intelligence.
- 3Buy
Wild
by Cheryl Strayed
The grief and self-reconstruction companion — Strayed rebuilding herself through a solo hike after her mother's death and her own collapse into addiction; shares The Glass Castle's interest in what a woman does with a childhood that did not give her the tools she needed.
- 4Buy
The Liar's Club
by Mary Karr
The East Texas chaotic childhood memoir companion — Karr growing up with an unstable mother and a storytelling father; the predecessor memoir in the tradition The Glass Castle works in: a woman looking honestly at a childhood that would have destroyed most people.
- 5Buy
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
The most extreme dysfunction memoir companion — Burroughs growing up in his mother's psychiatrist's chaotic household in Massachusetts, a childhood even less supervised and more bizarre than the Walls children's; the companion for readers who found The Glass Castle insufficient in its outrageousness.
- 6Buy
This Boy's Life
by Tobias Wolff
The troubled-youth memoir companion — Tobias Wolff growing up with an abusive stepfather in Concrete, Washington, and his escape through self-invention; the literary predecessor to The Glass Castle in the tradition of the memoir about a childhood that should have produced different results.
- 7Buy
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
The Irish poverty childhood memoir companion — McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of growing up in extreme poverty in Limerick, Ireland; the darkest and most formally accomplished of the chaotic poverty childhood memoirs that The Glass Castle joins.
- 8Buy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
The fiction companion — Francie Nolan growing up in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century with an alcoholic father and a determined mother; the foundational American novel about a girl who makes herself through books and determination in a family that cannot give her what she needs.
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