I Dare You To Try And Put This Book Down

Jeannette Walls sees a homeless lady rooting through a dumpster in New York City and is horrified to realize that it's her mother.

And so begins Walls' memoir, The Glass Castle --- a look back on a childhood and life that she used to be ashamed of to share with anybody.

"I was on fire.

It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew," writes Walls, as she starts to paint a picture of what life was like as one of the four children of Rex and Rose Mary Walls, two restless, free spirits who cobbled together a nomadic existence for their family.

At first, life seems like this great big adventure as they bounce around from one desert town to the next, with next to nothing to their names.

The only good thing about being dirt poor is that their alcoholic father can't scrape together enough cash to buy any booze.

Written in short, simply told chapters, Walls recounts her childhood in an astonishingly frank manner. There are slight traces of bitterness, but mostly, you just walk away, shaking your head in admiration over how these kids survived and had the strength to manage and to endure.

Father Rex easily finds jobs but just as easily loses them. Easily bored and always restless, Rex constantly yearns for the open road and dreams of finding gold with the use of his invention, the Prospector.

He's a big dreamer who talks about building a beautiful glass castle for his family, but it seems like they never get around to even breaking ground on that project. There's nothing but blueprints that they carry with them each time he suddenly announced that the family has to pack up in a hurry 'cause the feds are on their tail once again.

But as Jeanette and her siblings soon discover, it's really the bill collectors they're running away from.

As time goes by, Rex's dependency on alcohol deepens and he starts disappearing for days at a time, taking with him all the grocery money.

Jeannette and her younger brother, Brian, soon learn to become expert forragers, digging through school garbage cans for the discarded lunches of other students. But both are too ashamed to admit this to the other.

I know that Jeannette is really up-front about how she used to be uncomfortable and ashamed of her past and how she used to hide it from other people, but reading about certain episodes in her life, I couldn't help but admire her and her siblings.

Life was made harder for them by their parents, but instead of being bogged down by pity or anger, they had the courage to pour that energy into being resourceful and smart.

Older sister, Lori, goes through most of her early childhood in a blurry haze and when a school teacher informs the parents that Lori needs glasses, mother Rose Mary insists that Lori just needs to "train" her eyes to see better.

Mother Rose Mary wasn't much of a cook and whenever they managed to get some money, they'd stock up on enough staples and she'd cook enough beans for the week. When they started to go bad, they'd add hot sauce to disguise the taste. And when Jeannette complains about finding maggots in the ham, her mother tells her to stop being so picky and to eat around the maggots.

Arguing over who should provide for the family, Rose Mary would reluctantly take on the job of teaching when things got really tight --- but would always sink into a depression, wailing over how she was an "excitement addict" who needed more out of life. Sometimes, she would flat out refuse to work and stay at home to work on artwork that never sold.

At times, you're reading this memoir and you're just shaking your head over some of the things that the Walls tell their children --- like when they refuse to lock their front doors even after Jeannette wakes up to find a homeless guy has wandered in and was groping her in her bed.

Instead of locking the doors, they tell their kids they have to learn to never surrender to their fears.

And you read this and you're like, "What? Are you kidding me?" It's enough to make you want to slap them really hard. I got really angry and I really felt the powerlessness that Jeannette described --- the impotent rage that would sometimes rob her of the ability to stand up to her drunken father and delusional mother.

And when the kids start to grow up and start to focus on leaving home to create a better life for themselves, you can't help but cheer them on.

For me, I thought this memoir was just incredible --- Walls writes in the style that I admire most: it's unpretentious, it's simple, and it's intimate. She becomes someone you feel like you really know as you press forward through all the pages in this book.

It's a fast read and every time you have to put it down, you look forward to the next time you're able to pick it up again.

I couldn't help talking about this book non-stop, encouraging other people to read it.

"Just read the first pages of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and I defy you not to go on," Dominick Dunne dares on the back cover of the book.

You get blurbs like this on almost every book that you pick up these days, but after reading this, I'm going to second Dunne's dare.

I dare you to start reading this and then try and put it down.