The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls grew up with a brilliant, alcoholic father who promised to one day build his family a Glass Castle of solar panels and geometric roofs, and a painter mother who preferred adventure to steady employment or regular meals. Moving from one desert mining town to another and eventually to a collapsing house in West Virginia, the four Walls children learned to scavenge food from school garbage cans, survive winter nights without heat, and defend themselves against predatory adults their parents did not protect them from. The memoir tracks their flight, one by one, to New York City, and the author's long reckoning with a mother she still saw picking through dumpsters years after Walls herself had become a Manhattan gossip columnist. It is both love letter and indictment, clear-eyed and uncommonly generous.
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What you might want to know about The Glass Castle
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Jeannette Walls remembers a childhood of moving every few months across the Southwest with her dreamer father Rex, who promised to build a glass castle, and her painter mother Rose Mary. The book follows the children from desert poverty to a coal town in West Virginia and out to New York.
Yes. The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls's 2005 memoir about her unstable upbringing with her parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Walls is a journalist; the book draws on extensive memory and research.
Yes. A 2017 film adaptation starring Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson was released. The film follows the memoir's structure of alternating between Jeannette's adult life and her childhood.
The Glass Castle was written by Jeannette Walls, published in 2005 by Scribner.
The Glass Castle is 347 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Glass Castle takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Glass Castle is a standalone novel by Jeannette Walls, not part of a series.
The Glass Castle is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
