I am certainly glad that my book group chose The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls for our next meeting.  There is plenty to discuss after reading this book, especially with a group of mothers, all of whom hold strong opinions on child-raising, including the issues of discipline; how to protect against materialism (how to combat “the gimmes”); how to handle bullying; how to ensure kids eat healthy foods; how to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol; and the best way to educate kids about sex.

I am guessing there is not a woman in my book group who would follow the lead of Walls’ parents; for Rose and Rex Walls the belt sufficed for discipline; the constant cast-off of goods and eschewing of jobs ensured there was nothing to be materialistic about; kids had to fight their own battles (“suffering when you’re young is good for you….it immunized your body and your soul”); the best food was whatever was available (did they really eat grapes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for days at a time, when grapes were all they had?); alcohol was just Daddy’s addiction while Mama liked sweets; and insofar as sex education goes, the explanation that a cathouse was where women were nice to men was sufficient explanation until the darkest days when Dad used Walls’ nubile looks to scam a pool player, and then nudged her off to an upstairs apartment with the guy to calm him down.  Dad assured Walls later that he knew she could take care of herself: she was thirteen.

On the other hand, the parents in The Glass Castle, as mouth-droppingly horrible as they were in so many ways, did instill in their children a love of reading, a thirst for knowledge, a strong sense of self, and a rich family folklore that kept the kids loyal to each other and to their miscreant parents while keeping the family together.  There is no doubt that taking these kids away from their parents — but more importantly, away from each other — would have been disastrous to their minds and hearts, although their bodies may have been better nourished, better cleaned, and better sheltered, under someone else’s care.

The scene from one Christmas, when the father takes each of his children into the desert and allows them to pick out their very own star as their Christmas present (there is absolutely no money for anything else) I found incredibly moving, especially the way the father laughs off other families’ pretense at Santa and abundance of “cheap plastic” gifts:  “Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten…you’ll still have your stars.” The Christmas a few years later, however, when the father in a drunken roll set the Christmas tree afire and destroyed presents the kids had found through weeks of scouring through thrift shops and dollar stores, is simply horrible and heartbreaking.

That the father was an alcoholic and the mother bi-polar at best cannot excuse their failure as parents to keep their kids feeling safe.  As long as the kids were little, lies and stories preserved the family fable of the pioneering, prospecting, authority-defying free thinking Walls family troupe. But even then, the veneer of security was very thin. My heart broke (one of many breakdowns during the reading of this book) when early on in the memoir Walls describes a late-night “skedaddle” from a trailer park to escape debts and other trouble; a cat scratching in the back seat is flung unceremoniously from the car: “Anyone who didn’t like to travel wasn’t invited on our adventure, Dad said .”  As bad as I felt for the cat, I felt worse for the kids: would they be flung next?  As the kids got older, they wised up to their parents’ hypocrisies, lies, and failures, and began to depend more and more on each other, and trust their parents less and less.

Walls writes without rancor or sentimentality about her parents and the disjointed,  impoverished, and painful family life she endured for years. Her clear and clean prose make the stories she tells that much more shocking.  Her stories are a matter-of-fact recounting of a crazy life of skedaddling and binge drinking, of being tutored in physics and binomial numbers and given access to hundreds of books (this book is a testament to the power and wonder of the American public library system).  Walls writes unflinchingly but un-dramatically about enduring cycles of hunger and solace, and about feeling both solidarity with her family and utter insecurity under her parents’ care.  Her undeniable voice and her ability to look back on her childhood without judgment or anger is a testament to her resilience and her intelligence.  And the fact is that both her resilience and her intelligence can be traced back to her parents and their very bizarre ways.

Final heartbreak of the book?  When I realized that the Walls family kids kept on loving their parents through everything, just like the parents themselves had hung onto a love for their own abusive elders. The truth is that even when parents treat their kids badly, kids love their parents.  Such love is not just a gift (the best gift ever), it is also a huge responsibility. As parents, we have to  deserve the love of our children, and hold onto their trust.  I know my book group will have a lot to say about that.