The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

(Sorry to start your Monday off with dense subjects but here goes...)

Usually the nonfiction table of a bookshop is like the negative charge to my positive charge. I steer clear without even glancing at the table.  I especially always wonder why people read those blood-curdling memoirs of people like Dave Pelzer (A Boy Called It, A Man Named Dave).  A chronology of an awful childhood? I'll take a raincheck... It's the stuff of nightmares, not of literature. 

But after reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, I think I might be starting to understand why.

If it hadn’t been out since 2005, I would be trying to alert the masses about this one. Dreaming but drunk father.  Storybook move to New York.  Absurd success story. And on the flip side? Endless fires. Despicable adults. Pernicious predators. 

Jeannette Walls' chronicle of her family's peculiar life reverses what most see as an American journey of dreams, westward ho!  Normally, one begins in the claustrophobic East Coast city laden with expectations and suffocating normalcy. One then deserts all social norms for the promise and dream of the West, of the other.  

But the Walls family all but embodies that otherness of the West, and the reality is both gruesomely horrifying and grippingly beautiful.  Mr. Walls steals from his children while instilling them with endless imagination.  The children often go hungry yet grow up with every kid's fantasy of full freedom.  But such a life is not what Jeannette and her siblings crave, and each ends up in the city of all cities: New York. 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Walls' lifestyle I somewhat glossed over is that they would hate the word you'd probably use to describe them: poor.  It implies there was no choice in their lifetstyle, and it implies there is pity to be poured upon them.  Au contraire. The Walls family, as is duly noted throughout the The Glass Castle, chooses this lifestyle, and the parents maintain it until their dying day.

So you may think I am now a convert to nonfiction, but to be honest, I don’t think that anything is going to live up to this little gem. The only two who are getting a chance are Julie Andrew (who I prefer to call Fraulein Maria) and Joan Didion (because I want to be her).  (Recommendations encouraged here.)

And my last concern? That after this fine work of art Jeannette Walls will have nothing else to write about. I guess we shall see with her upcoming fall release, Half Broke Horses. It's a "true life novel," whatever that means.