The Glass Castle By Jeanette Walls Essay Topics

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a memoir of Walls’s life where she reflects on events throughout her life that made her who she is. In the beginning, Walls is in a taxi in New York City, when she looks out the window to see her homeless mother scavenging for useful items in a dumpster. It is then Walls gets ahold of her mother to meet for dinner, which prompts the beginning of the recollection of her life. The first event Walls recalls is when she was three and set herself on fire while cooking hotdogs. Her parents reluctantly bring her to the hospital where Walls stays a few days until her father, Rex Walls, takes her on the “great skedaddle” and rushes Walls out of the hospital to the running car waiting outside and drives back home.
While living in the desert out of their car Rex explains to his family how he will one day build a ‘glass castle’ for him and the kids to live, hence the title of the book, as he is quite intelligent when not poisoned with alcohol. Eventually Walls’s mother, Rose Mary, gets pregnant and gives birth to the youngest Walls member, Maureen, which is when the family moves to Phoenix to a house inherited by Rose Mary after her mother dies. The house in Phoenix was bigger than the Walls expected, but with Rex being an alcoholic and Rose Mary being an obsessive artist who did not look after her children, the kids had to raise themselves, often went hungry, and never were clean. Eventually after Rex decides to move again, the family settles on Welsh, West Virginia to live with Rex’s mother, much to his dismay. Under the watch of Rex’s mother, Erma, the kids soon find out she was inappropriately touching Walls’s brother, Brian, and Walls’s sister, Lori, gets in psychical fight with Erma that prompts her to lock them all in the