The Glass Castle
Her father was a genius and a drunk. Her mother was an artist and a child. She raised herself and became a journalist. She tells it all without rage.
The Walls Family
Jeannette Walls's 2005 memoir follows her extraordinary childhood with her parents Rex and Mary Rose Walls, who moved the family constantly across the American West and Southwest, fleeing debts and the authorities, living in poverty and burning with intellectual energy. Rex is a brilliant engineer who cannot stay sober. Mary Rose is a talented artist who refuses to be domestic. The children cook their own food, educate themselves, and survive. The glass castle Rex promises to build is never built. Walls tells the story with love and precision and without a trace of victimhood. The memoir spent over 260 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
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"I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.
"Jeannette Walls
Walls was working as a celebrity gossip journalist in New York, writing about other people's scandalous lives, when she saw her mother picking through rubbish in Manhattan and decided she had to write the truth about her own.
Her father Rex Walls died of a heart attack in 1994. The memoir was published eleven years later. Walls has said she could not have written it while he was alive, not because she feared his reaction, but because she loved him.