Finally facing her fears of being ostracized by the
community she has immersed herself in as a regular contributor to MSNBC, Jeannette
Walls reveals her past in her memoir, The
Glass Castle. The second half of this book takes the reader from her age of
ten on to what may be her early twenties, now married to John Taylor in an old
farmhouse for one last Walls family reunion during Thanksgiving. Throughout
this half of the book, Walls’s issues had only intensified, growing to the
point of being unbearable as she struggled to save up a sufficient amount of
money only to lose it all again in one fell swoop to her father’s drinking
habits. When she finally took a bus to New York to live with Lori, who had
moved out as soon as she graduated, things began to improve in the author’s
lifestyle, but her parents still insisted on remaining poor, just barely
getting by even when they followed their children to the big city. This memoir
was shared to inspire its readers, especially the less fortunate facing severe
struggles such as poverty, into striving to reach their goals even if their
childhood is tough. It also serves to let those who have already succeeded know
that, despite whatever their past may have been, they should feel no reason to
be ashamed of it.
One
of the things I feel Jeannette Walls did really well in particular is the way
she organized the entire book. While it was told in chronological order from
her earliest memory to the more recent ones, each sub-chapter within the five
chapters of the book were merely snapshots of her life. While many of the
details she gave seemed as if they could’ve been easily omitted from the text
at the time just to move on in the story, Walls told every occasion with what
felt like a sense of purpose. Each of these snapshots, no matter how
insignificant they may have seemed to me as a reader having just read a much
juicier part a mere few pages preceding it, had some sort of importance to the
memoir as a whole. One instance that stood out to me immediately was the use of
the word ‘skedaddle’. The word seemed to lose its importance in Walls’s life as
I grew immersed in all her other struggles that seemed to come one after the
other without pause, but when she said to her father, “Promise you’ll stay here
until you get better […] I don’t want you doing the skedaddle” (Walls 261), I
was abruptly reminded of her earlier years when she first saw the constant
movement and poverty as an adventure.
It was a sort of full
circle that tightened the links between the snapshots all the way from her
memory as a three-year-old because they all contributed to who she is in that
moment with her father in the hospital as well as her success from all the
hardships she pushed through since the beginning. It told me as a reader that
every moment mattered, led her to success, and now here she was sharing
everything without fretting over the criticism she believed she would receive for
so long. This openness with both good and bad events also reassures the reader
that, even when times are tough, everything builds who they choose to become,
and if they succeed and escape from it, they should not be afraid to recount
those times to others.
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