Glass Castle
Did you notice anything unusual about Jeannette Walls portrayal of poverty, or homelessness? * Even though they had bad times with food and other necessities, they still were happy as a family * When she was young, she viewed life as an adventure and when she got older and in West Virginia she started to see reality of her life and she didn’t want to be seen as the girl who lives in the beat up house and the family that didn’t always have food * She doesn’t let her situation of poverty be an excuse or a burden for not being successful and she knew she was going to push past it * It shows that the Walls’ lifestyle was a choice, when her she figures out her mom has had land worth a million dollars and she just wanted to live the way she was living
When did Jeannette figure out that her life was not normal? * When film makers came to Welch and were making a documentary and she saw films about life in New York, she saw there was life outside the way they were living * When her dad was prostituting her out, her view of her father was changed * When she went over to a friend’s house they had a thermostat and she had never experience one before and this she realized there was much more like that and the way she was living wasn’t normal
Do you think her parents were mentally ill?
Her mom would stay in bed for days at a time and she would not even take care of her own kids and do nothing, she was probably in depression
The dad was an alcoholic (when he tried to quit in Arizona he had withdrawal) and this was a mental illness
He might have been molested by his mother, Erma-When Erma was molesting Brian and the children told their father he denied it and became very angry, probably trying to cover up what happened to him
He also never wanted to go to West Virginia, he said it was because of pride but he was probably scared of going back to Erma
Being molested by his would explain his alcoholism,