The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

Jeanette Walls is a successful gossip reporter for MSNBC, but until she wrote The Glass Castle she harbored a family secret. While she was enjoying a glamorous New York City lifestyle, her own parents were living on the streets, rooting through dumpsters for food and wearing rags to stay warm. The story of this supremely dysfunctional family began in Arizona, where Walls’ earliest memory is of being set on fire at age three while cooking hot dogs for dinner. Walls’ alcoholic father and artist mother moved their four children from place to place whenever the bills piled up, eventually landing in Welch, West Virginia, near their paternal grandparents. Here their father encouraged the children to dig a large hole for the foundation of the palace he planned to build for them, the “Glass Castle” of the memoir’s title. But they couldn’t afford the town’s trash collection fee, and the hole for the Glass Castle’s foundation became the family dump. Meanwhile, the Walls children survived neglect, hunger, ridicule, and abuse. This gripping memoir reveals how the author survived her childhood, escaping the cycle of poverty, and how the long shadow of her parents’ unconventional lifestyle eventually caught up with her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0XVno–0gM Amy Pickett