The Theme Of 'A Silver Lining In Jeanette Walls The Glass Castle'

A Silver Lining in The Glass Castle If friends are the family we choose, then family are the people we are either luckily or unfortunately stuck with. While friendship can make an escape from an insufferable family, if you had the childhood of author, Jeanette Walls, you might have found friendships are difficult to forge when your family makes you a social pariah. Walls spent her childhood as a nomad through small desert towns, impoverished and at the whim of her eccentric parents. Her father fell in and out of alcoholism, while her mother spent more time daydreaming then living. With 3 other siblings, Walls found herself at the mercy of survival, growing up quickly and resourcefully. Walls wrote, "The Glass Castle" as an homage to my parents
You might name the interests you had, your school, teachers, friends, and activities; but if you live your life as a nomad naming these items is an impossible way to define yourself. The list of people and places you have seen is too numerous, and each place might only have had a minor impact on shaping you (depending on how long you lived there). It is interesting in reading The Glass Castle, as Walls tends to describe her thoughts and reasoning more than her activities. Her activities were only background noise to her trying to understand her family, and she took notice of not only how she was feeling but of how others viewed her family, and began at an early age weighing whether her family was in the right or wrong. In her early years she is more leaning towards simply enjoying her eccentric family, but as she ages she begins to refute them. This thought pattern happened early on, and helped her mature beyond her years, and while she might not have always understood what was happening, her frequent analyzing built irrefutable self-esteem and maturity, which echoes back to her sense of independence. While most children grow up relying on others, living their life in context, Walls grew up relying on herself, and analyzing her life, and the lives of those around her. These rationalizations and comparisons bred maturity, self-awareness, and personal
Passion drives success. Walls later said, “Students have to believe in themselves. That's not always easy if they've got a tough situation at home -- I was lucky because, despite our circumstances, my parents believed in me -- but the human spirit can be very resilient” (ABC). The Walls’ children found their passions through their experiences growing up, Walls found reading, writing and journalism to be an escape from her difficult childhood, and so dreamed of becoming a writer. It was a passion discovered through hardship, and a goal obtained through determination to not be like her parents. In a similar fashion Lori discovered art. Their brother, Brian, chose to become a police officer after having called law enforcement to their home as a child. It could be said that they chose to chase their dreams in the way their parents also chose to follow their more unorthodox lifestyles, but chose to do it in a more responsible fashion having suffered from their parents’ choices. “They chased their dreams instead of what is considered conventional” (The Colbert Report). In either sense, the Walls’ children found success in their respective fields as a result of their