Reading Order
The Glass Castle Reading Order
Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle (2005) is a memoir of growing up with Rex and Rose Mary Walls, parents who were brilliant, alcoholic, and profoundly neglectful — who moved their four children across the American Southwest and Appalachia in a series of ramshackle houses, living on the fringe of society, with Rex always promising to build his children a glass castle someday. One of the bestselling memoirs of the twenty-first century, The Glass Castle is about poverty, parental failure, love that coexists with damage, and the story we tell ourselves about the family we had.
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The Glass Castle
Complete The Glass Castle Book List
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The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls·2005·The complete standalone memoir. A quick read; some readers follow it with Walls's novel Half Broke Horses (2009), about her maternal grandmother, which fills in the family's history. - Buy
Half Broke Horses
OptionalJeannette Walls·2009·Walls's 'true-life novel' about her maternal grandmother Lily Casey Smith — a teacher, rancher, and horse trainer who was the toughest person Walls knew — provides context for the family history that produced the parents in The Glass Castle.
The Glass Castle — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Glass Castle a true story?
Yes — The Glass Castle is a memoir, and Walls has maintained that the events she describes are accurate. Her parents and siblings are real people: Rex Walls, her father, died in 2001 before the memoir was published; Rose Mary Walls, her mother, was still alive when the memoir appeared and was later photographed at a book signing. Walls's siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen have all confirmed the general outlines of their childhood, though they have different perspectives on specific events and different emotional responses to the life they shared. The memoir generated controversy because of its unflinching portrayal of child neglect — Walls has described instances where her parents allowed their children to go hungry while the adults drank, and where injuries went untreated — and some readers have found it difficult to accept that Walls's tone toward her parents is as ambivalent and even loving as it is. Walls has said that her goal was not to condemn her parents but to understand them.
How did Jeannette Walls become a journalist?
Despite growing up in profound poverty and moving so frequently that she rarely attended school consistently, Walls managed to get herself to New York City at seventeen, work her way through college (first at a community college, then at Barnard College), and eventually become a journalist and gossip columnist for New York magazine and MSNBC. The memoir's final section covers her years building a career in New York while her parents, by choice, lived homeless on the streets of Manhattan — a sequence that crystallizes the memoir's central paradox: the children who survived Rex and Rose Mary's parenting often credit them with instilling the resilience and independence that allowed them to survive, even as that survival required them to leave their parents behind.
What is the glass castle of the title?
The glass castle is Rex Walls's perpetual promise to his children: someday, when he gets the money, when he finds a good piece of land, when he develops his solar energy invention (which he worked on intermittently for years), he will build them a house made entirely of glass, with a solar energy system, self-sufficient and magnificent. For the children, the glass castle is both a genuine dream and an ongoing frustration — evidence of their father's imagination and his incapacity to translate imagination into reality, evidence that Rex Walls always preferred the vision to the work. The foundation of the glass castle is eventually dug in Welch, West Virginia, but the children eventually use the hole as a trash pit, abandoning the dream before it can be abandoned by their father.
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