Learning how to swim

The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible.

Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal, selfish and irresponsible alcoholic. His wife Mary Rose is a painter who detests domestic chores and has an attitude towards her children as robust as her husband’s. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she says, and expects them to find their own food, and fight their own battles. Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maur- een learn harsh lessons about self- sufficiency from the earliest age imaginable. Being unfed and largely ignored, the children swiftly become wise beyond their years, and a good deal wiser than their parents. It is a family in which the children look on solemnly as their father dangles their mother from an upstairs window.

Rex takes whatever odd job is going, and fantasises about drumming up ‘investment money’ to finance his projects: a machine for prospecting gold, and a glass house running on solar energy (the ‘Glass Castle’ of the title). Both projects remain resolutely stuck at the planning stage, since time after time Rex loses his job, runs up bills all over town, and has to ‘do the skedaddle’ — i.e. get out of town pretty damn quick. Despite being qualified as a teacher, Mary Rose lets the children starve almost to death before she goes to work. ‘I’m a grown woman,’ she complains. ‘Why can’t I do what I want to do?’

For sheer selfishness it is hard to choose between the parents. Mary Rose secretly scoffs chocolate bars while the children root through bins for food.