:INFO
The Memoir That Is Honest About Ambivalence
Most memoirs about difficult childhoods resolve into gratitude or condemnation. The Glass Castle does neither. Jeannette Walls writes about her father Rex with genuine love and genuine fury at the same time, and she does not resolve that tension because it has not resolved. Her parents were charismatic, brilliant, reckless, and negligent, and she understood all of those things simultaneously. That honesty is what makes the book important and also what makes it uncomfortable.


:NOW
Still thinking about which parent is harder to understand

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Jeannette Walls]
No child is responsible for the choices her parents make for her.


:JOURNEY
Reading The Glass Castle
5 Most visceral
4 Complicated love
4 Peak ambivalence
5 Refuses resolution

:NOTE
The book asks something difficult of the reader: to hold love and anger about the same people at the same time. It does not let you pick one side and stay there.


:POLL
How did you feel about Rex Walls by the end of The Glass Castle?
Angry, the love Walls shows him felt unearned
Complicated, I understood both the love and the anger
Sympathetic, I found him tragic more than culpable
I have not read the book yet