The Glass Castle Themes

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, is a story of an unconventional family trying to make their way in the world. This memoir recounts the struggles the author faced growing up. Problems such as poverty, starvation, illness, homelessness, and addiction surrounded her family life. None the less, they overcame these predicaments. The Glass Castle has a wide array of ideas, but the themes I found most relevant were unconditional love, self-realization, and perseverance. These themes were most relevant because they appear most often throughout the storyline. The family someone is born into is not something they get to choose, but they are able to decide how they treat them. Jeanette was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on your perspective)
She became independent at a young age for survival, but heavily depended on her parents personal beliefs. As she grew up and collected information from the multiple environments and situations she was thrown into she began to form her own opinions. She no longer wanted to live the nomad life, and craved settlement and security. She found her passion in the 7th grade, when she was the first person her age to work for the Maroon Wave. She started working there to get away from the cruel comments and treatments she was receiving from the other children in her grade, but the revelation that she could be more struck her. "Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on" (Collins 204). Jeanette took this realization and let her ambition drive her to the