November Memoir Pick: The Glass Castle
With the winter season upon us, comes cooler temperatures. Colder weather also means it’s that much harder to survive on the streets. Speaking of streets, right now, half a million individuals are living in a state of homelessness in the United States. This is why The Glass Castle, a story about a little girl whose parents ended up homeless, is worth reading, now more than ever.
Some memoirs are so impactful they sit with you for years after you read them. The Glass Castle is one of those books. While it’s not a new release, it’s constantly being added to book clubs and lists because Jeannette Walls life story is just that captivating.
This is a story about survival, a glimpse into the life children of unstable parents live in and the turmoil they must navigate as they realize their caretakers might be unfit to care for them. What I love about this story is all the stereotypes the author, Jeannette Walls, breaks down about people who live on the street. First, she shows how her parents ended up without a home by providing the reader with a firsthand look into her parent’s life story and all the decisions that eventually lead them to be without a home.
Second, she breaks down the stereotype that all kids raised by parents struggling with their mental health and addiction, also fall fate to these behaviors. Jeannette Walls is a light of hope to so many youth born into dysfunctional living situations to say yes – you can rise above poverty, but she is the first one to admit, it won’t be easy, and it will take all the mental strength you have inside of you to do so.
While there are so many heart-wrenching moments in this book, watching little children live in a shack without food or clean water, Walls doesn’t ask for pity. Instead, she gives the reader a new way to look at dirty, uneducated children from dysfunction parents. See the good qualities in them that came from the result of a hard life. Walls shares her strengths that came from a chaotic childhood. Resilience. Grit. Determination. In fact, theses were the exact qualities she needed to make it as a journalist at The New York Times. Here are 5 more things you will lean after reading The Glass Castle.
5 Things You Will Learn After You Read The Glass Castle
1. How to find the good in an undesirable situation
2. How resilient human beings can be.
3. That parents, even dysfunctional addicts, love their kids as much as functional ones do.
4. This book will reveal how easily children in the United States slip through the cracks, living in unfit living conditions with hardly anything to eat.
5. A child who has somebody who believes in them, will always have a better chance at rising above a catastrophic living situation, than a child who does not.
