A review by afutt92
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

3.0

Ok, so I think I’ve figured something out… I don’t like “tragedy porn memoirs.” I know a lot of people love them, as would be evidenced by the high reviews these always inevitably get. I thought it about Hillbilly Elegy, I thought it about Educated, I thought it about The Glass Castle. These books almost always take the exact same structure: here’s my poor, dysfunctional, extremely messed up family. Here’s how terrible my childhood was. Think things can’t get worse? Well they just did! Think things can’t get worse after that? Think again, because here comes another massive tragedy dump? There’s also a checklist of traumatic events that the protagonist has inevitably been through: poverty, abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, usually all 3), a parent experiencing alcoholism or drug addiction. After a horrifically awful childhood and young adulthood often marred by addictions of their own, the protagonist pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, manages to somehow get into an Ivy League school despite little formal education, and becomes successful. I think my dislike of this type of memoir is that I’ve worked with families in similar situations and this type of thing almost NEVER happens. You’d like to think it does, but it doesn’t. Instead it’s just a vicious cycle of continued poverty, addiction, and trauma, generation after generation.

I did think it was well-written, and I noticed the massive shift in tone between childhood Jeanette, who idolized her parents (particularly her father) and wasn’t really aware of how terrible things were, to older Jeanette starting to see her parents for who and what they were, and becoming angry at their failures and the reality of her life, and desperate trying to claw herself out of that life.