The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

It’s a running joke that there’s never any food in my parents’ house. My mother lacks the foresight necessary for adequate grocery shopping, although even when my mother was at her most Hubbard, I never had to eat exclusively grapes for three weeks or pick through other kids’ discarded lunches in the bathroom garbage so that I could eat that day.

Sound like the makings of an Oprah special? Absolutely. But thankfully, The Glass Castle doesn’t read this way. This absolutely captivating memoir isn’t about self-pity or finger pointing, but simply documents an extraordinary childhood at once rich in imagination and adventure and bitingly impoverished.

Of course it is Jeannette’s parents who created this bipolar existence for their children. She has a brilliant and charming, but alcoholic father who took his daughter inside a leopard cage or demon hunting in the desert, but also wouldn’t hold a job and stole his daughters’ meager savings to finance his addiction.  Her mother is a free-spirited artist who appreciates learning and beauty but who disdains regular work and domestic duties.

As we follow Jeannette from the age of three through her teenage years, we watch as the Walls parents lose their magical glow, and the children [...]