The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir of growing up poor and often hungry with a brilliant, alcoholic father and an artist mother who refused to settle down, and of how she escaped. For readers interested in family, poverty and resilience.
Author · 1 summary
Jeannette Walls
American writer and journalist
- Born
- 21 April 1960 (age 66)
- Birthplace
- Phoenix, Arizona, United States
- Nationality
- American
- Occupation
- Writer, Journalist
- Known for
- The Glass Castle, a memoir of growing up poor with a drinking father and an artist mother
- Wikipedia
- Read the article
About Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent her early childhood moving from town to town across the desert Southwest. Her family later settled in Welch, a poor coal town in West Virginia. At 17 she left for New York City, where she studied at Barnard College.
She became a journalist and spent years writing about celebrities and gossip for New York magazine, Esquire and MSNBC. For a long time she hid her background. Her parents had followed her to New York and were living on the streets and in a squat.
The Glass Castle (2005) tells that story in plain, unsentimental scenes. Her father was clever and inventive but drank, and her mother was an artist who would not take steady work, so the children often went hungry. The book argues that a child can love her parents and still need to escape them. It stayed on bestseller lists for years and became a film in 2017. Her later books include Half Broke Horses (2009). She lives in Virginia.
Books by Jeannette Walls
New books, occasionally