The Glass Castle

“That was the thing about the hospital. You never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum. I would have been happy staying in that hospital forever.” 

Little is known about the Wallses’ life at this point in the book. However, the fact that Jeannette would rather live in the hospital than return to her life in the trailer park speaks volumes about the struggles her family faces. It also renders Dad’s late-night abduction of Jeannette from the hospital all the more symbolic, as he rips her from a state of existence in which all her needs are addressed.

“The next day the saguaros and prickly pears were fat from drinking as much as they could, because they knew it might be a long, long time until the next rain. We were sort of like the cactus. We ate irregularly, and when we did, we’d gorge ourselves.” 

The extent to which the Wallses are well-suited to desert life is illustrated here, with the saguaros and prickly pears standing in as symbols for their hunger. Mom in particular would appreciate this symbolism, given her insistence that beauty is forged through struggle and therefore desert landscapes are most beautiful. That said, the book regularly calls into question whether Mom truly has her children’s best interests in mind when it comes to her approach toward parenting, or whether her aphorisms are merely excuses to justify her inability or refusal to nurture her children.

“That was why we had to find gold. To get Mom a new wedding ring. That and so we could build the Glass Castle.” 

This comes shortly after the first mention of the Glass Castle, the dominant symbol in the book. The Glass Castle represents an impossible dream that nevertheless helps the characters maintain a sense of hope for the future. Juxtaposing the impossible Glass Castle with what is frankly an achievable goal—getting Mom a new wedding ring—highlights the extent to which Dad cannot be relied upon for even the most modest achievements. In other words, the chances of Dad working in one place long enough to save up for a new wedding ring are roughly equal to his chances of building an impossible house made entirely of glass.

“I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn’t have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.” 

At the start of the book, danger and excitement go hand in hand for Jeannette. Despite almost dying twice as a result of fire, Jeannette views fire a unified symbol for everything that keeps life with Mom and Dad interesting. It is only when she grows older that she comes to realize allowing your three-year-old child to use the stove unsupervised or leaving that same child alone in a flophouse with a book of matches for an hour doesn’t constitute the makings of a great adventure. It’s simply neglect.

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. ‘You’d be destroying what makes it special,’ she said. ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.’” 

Like the saguaro and the prickly pear, the Joshua tree is a powerful symbol for how Mom views her children. To Jeannette, the dry and windblown Joshua tree is a symbol of ugliness and neglect. Why not nurture it, Jeannette wonders, so it can grow tall and proud like other trees. Mom’s response reflects two important aspects of her character. The first is that she romanticizes hardship, in part as a coping mechanism to help her survive her chaotic life with Dad. The second is that, as an artist, Mom tends to view everything in abstract, aesthetic terms, often to the detriment of her children’s well-being.

“We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. ‘Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,’ Dad said, ‘you’ll still have your stars.’” 

This quote serves a number of purposes, the first of which is to introduce Christmas as a dominant motif that reflects the family’s dynamic in a given year. This Christmas season, when Dad gives stars and a planet to the children because he cannot afford store-bought gifts, represents the life of the Wallses at its most romantic. They have nothing but each other, but in this moment, that is enough. In fact, it is more than enough, at least to Jeannette, who views her family’s differences as a badge of honor. As Jeannette grows older and the family sinks deeper into poverty, this heavily romanticized view of her father will fade.

“My favorite rocks to find were geodes, which Mom said came from the volcanoes that had erupted to form the Tuscarora Mountains millions of years ago, during the Miocene period. From the outside, geodes looked like boring round rocks, but when you broke them open with a chisel and hammer, the insides were hollow, like a cave, and the walls were covered with glittering white quartz crystals or sparkling purple amethysts.” 

Unlike her mother, Jeannette is not terribly concerned with aesthetics or appearances. Perhaps this lack of concern is due to her own insecurities about the way she looks, in part a consequence of the severe scarring on her legs from the cooking accident. Thus, the geode symbolizes her inner beauty—a perhaps obvious metaphor for Jeannette herself, yet also a powerful one, given that for much of her life as a child, she assesses her own value based on Dad’s repeated acknowledgement of the beauty that exists inside her. The geode is in many ways the opposite of the Joshua tree, which reflects its beauty outward.

“Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. ‘It’s a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven’t figured ‘em out yet,’ he said. ‘You-all got a little too close to it today.’” 

Turbulence and order are major fixations for Dad, whose own life seems to constantly teeter in that dangerous space between these two states. Despite his warning, Dad seems most comfortable existing within this boundary, given his tendency to vacillate between order and chaos in his own life. The author, however, characterizes this zone as a mirage. Indeed, whatever happiness or fulfillment Dad achieves by positioning himself at the nexus of order and turbulence is largely illusory.

“Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is ‘If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.’ What other reason, he asked, would possibly make him do this? Once I got my breath back, I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it.” 

The book’s chief psychological arc concerns Jeannette’s passage into adulthood by letting go of her illusions about Dad. This is one of the earliest instances in which Jeannette questions whether Dad truly cares about her well-being. However, at this point in the book, Jeannette is not ready to acknowledge Dad’s capacity for abuse and cruelty, nor is she ready to see the more toxic elements of their relationship with clear eyes. 

“I hated Billy at that moment, I really did. I thought of telling him about binary numbers and the Glass Castle and Venus and all the things that made my dad special and completely different from his dad, but I knew Billy wouldn’t understand. I started to run out of the house, but then I stopped and turned around. ‘My daddy is nothing like your daddy!’ I shouted. ‘When my daddy passes out, he never pisses himself!’” 

This quote effectively captures Jeannette’s rather delusional attitude toward her father. She is perfectly willing to accept that Dad is a drunk, but the fact that he is able to pass out without urinating himself elevates him to a hero’s status in her mind. Furthermore, her outburst of anger against Billy suggests a great deal of repressed anger toward her own father, which she fails to acknowledge so as to maintain her delusions.

“‘I’m not so sure,’ Dad said. ‘Every damn thing in the universe can be broken down into smaller things, even atoms, even protons, so theoretically speaking, I guess you had a winning case. A collection of things should be considered one thing. Unfortunately, theory don’t always carry the day.’” 

This quote comes in response to Jeannette’s insistence that she should have been able to take her entire rock collection to Phoenix and not just one geode. Dad prohibits the children from taking more than one favored object every time they move, perhaps as an effort to discourage an overreliance on material objects. There’s also a deeper subtext to this quote. As an enthusiast of physics, Dad overwhelmingly relies on theoretical notions in his everyday life, stubbornly resisting anything he might perceive as conformity or authority. If he were willing to be more flexible with respect to these theoretical concepts, he would be far better-suited to provide for his family.

“I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah.”

Until now, almost every observation of the Walls family is filtered through Jeannette’s childhood perspective and thus informed by a series of illusions she holds dear. Only here does the reader hear how the Wallses are perceived from the outside, as “dirty little urchin children” with their “crazy drunk” father. For Jeannette, filth and drunkenness are normalized and therefore rarely addressed in these terms. This quote also serves a second function: to reflect how Jeannette, at this point in the book, still tries to justify her family’s hardship by pointing out that without her Dad’s unfettered devotion to chaos, she would have never had the singular experience of being licked by a cheetah.

“She’d been reading books on how to cope with an alcoholic, and they said that drunks didn’t remember their rampages, so if you cleaned up after them, they’d think nothing had happened. ‘Your father needs to see the mess he’s making of lives,’ Mom said. But when Dad got up, he’d act as if all the wreckage didn’t exist, and no one discussed it with him.” 

This is a stark example of Mom’s codependent behavior with respect to Dad. The advice she shares is valid under normal circumstances, and her efforts to address Dad’s alcoholism are admirable. However, because Mom has already shown so much tolerance for chaos and squalor, Dad does not think twice about waking up amid the wreckage of his latest drunken rampage. So while up after an alcoholic partner is an act of enabling, in this scenario, Mom’s refusal to clean up after Dad is equally enabling.

“But Dad said 93 Little Hobart Street was such a dump that we shouldn’t waste time or energy on it that we could be devoting to the Glass Castle. Mom said she thought bright yellow houses were tacky. Brian and Lori said we didn’t have the ladders and scaffolding we needed.” 

Each character’s response to Jeannette’s efforts to beautify the house on Little Hobart Street reflects their character. Mom, for example, views virtually everything—including potential acts of self-improvement—through aesthetic terms. Brian and Lori have come to adopt a fatalistic attitude toward their circumstances. Finally, Dad continues to focus on impossible dreams like the Glass Castle, rather than accomplish smaller, achievable goals like painting the house they already have.

“His face was tight and closed, but I could tell he was distraught. More distraught than I’d ever seen him, which surprised me, because Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over Dad, and I thought he’d be relieved to be free of it.”

While the logic that Dad would be happy to be rid of his abuser is sound to Jeannette, it also reflects a child’s understanding of trauma. As shown through Dad’s reaction to Brian’s sexual abuse at the hands of Erma, it is likely that Dad is in deep denial over his own abuse. Therefore, having never come to grips with it during Erma’s lifetime—and likely having never confronted her about it—it is now that much more difficult for Dad to heal emotionally. 

“Mom fell through a rotted step and went tumbling down the hillside. She had bruises on her legs and arms for weeks. ‘My husband doesn’t beat me,’ she’d say when anyone stared at them. ‘He just won’t fix the stairs.’” 

With this quip, Mom tacitly acknowledges the extent to which neglect is its own form of abuse. Indeed, the most traumatic memories for Jeannette do not involve her sporadic whippings at the hands of Dad, but rather the starvation and deprivation the children suffer because of their parents’ refusal or inability to provide for them. The situation with Mom is a bit more subtle, given that she, too, is both an active and a passive conspirator in the children’s neglect. Perhaps this is why she approaches her accident on the step with a measure of gallows humor and a lack of seriousness.

“By ‘us’ I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time—technically, at least—but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was.”

This quote is a disturbingly effective expression of how de facto segregation works in the American South. By this point, federal courts and legislation had prohibited lawful segregation, yet a decade later, segregation persisted in states like West Virginia because deeply ingrained racist attitudes and customs are difficult to break. Moreover, public facilities found ways to facilitate segregation while still maintaining a formal veil of colorblindness, for example by charging pool users a small fee during peak hours.

“‘Pillars shaped like women,’ Lori said. ‘The ones holding up those Greek temples with their heads. I was looking at a picture of some the other day, thinking, Those women have the second toughest job in the world.” 

Around this point in the book, Jeannette finally begins to acknowledge how difficult it is for Mom to prevent Dad from siphoning off the entirety of the family’s finances in service of his drinking and gambling habits. From this perspective, the fact that Mom can devote any money at all toward bills and food is a minor miracle. The quote also reflects the surplus of empathy Lori feels toward Mom, at least compared to Jeannette’s attitude toward her, thus better contextualizing Lori’s closer relationship with Mom in New York.

“For the first time, I had a clear idea of what Mom was up against. Being a strong woman was harder than I had thought.” 

While Jeannette has already acknowledged the hardship Mom faces with respect to Dad, she does not truly understand it until she is charged with handling the family’s finances while Mom and Lori are away for the summer. As a child who clearly needs affection and nurturing, Jeannette always favored Dad over Mom, who rarely offered much in the way of emotional validation. This realization is thus an important step in Jeannette’s broader emotional arc, in which she lets go of her delusional admiration for Dad.

“Dad said he was damned if Feigenbaum didn’t make a persuasive case that turbulence was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed.” 

So much of Dad’s attitudes and behavior are seen through the lens of turbulence and order throughout the book. He is both an agent of chaos and one who basks in chaos. By framing turbulence as just another part of a broader orderly pattern too complex for mortals to perceive, the book reframes Dad’s entire approach toward life. It is perhaps telling that following this epiphany, Dad’s allegiance to chaos is briefly broken during his stint of sobriety and gainful employment upstate—a period that only ends when Mom convinces him to return to New York City.

“But Mom and Dad were clearly proud, and as I listened to them talk—interrupting each other in their excitement to correct points of fact and fill in gaps in the story—about their fellow squatters and the friends they’d made in the neighborhood and the common fight against the city’s housing agency, it became clear they’d stumbled on an entire community of people like themselves, people who lived unruly lives battling authority and who liked it that way. After all those years of roaming, they’d finally found home.” 

This is the closest Jeannette comes to defining her parents’ philosophy. Their actions have always clearly reflected a strong antipathy toward authority, conformity, and boredom, yet much of their nomadic and self-destructive behavior often comes across like chaos for its own sake. By finally finding a community of likeminded individuals with a shared adversary to battle, Mom and Dad can finally root themselves to one place.

“I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad’s time on the street—not to mention their current life in an abandoned tenement—been a caprice inflicted on us by Mom?” 

This revelation calls into question many of the possible reasons behind the Walls family’s transience and indigence. It cannot all be the result of Dad’s alcoholism, or Mom’s artistic ambitions, or the pair’s shared hatred of conformity and authority. The truth is, Mom could have at any moment ensured that Jeannette and her siblings would never go hungry or suffer a cold winter ever again, yet she chose not to. At no point does Jeannette try to explain this decision, which may be frustrating to the reader—yet the truth may be that Jeannette’s guess is no better than the reader’s.

“We hadn’t gotten together since Maureen’s arraignment. Something in all of us broke that day, and afterward, we no longer had the spirit for family gatherings.” 

In the family’s failure to gather in the wake of Maureen’s sentence to a psychiatric facility, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the extent to which the family failed the youngest Walls sibling. Jeannette is particularly devastated by Maureen’s fate, having promised to take care of her always upon first holding her as an infant. While for a long time Maureen sought help from outsiders and thus was not overly reliant on her siblings, as a consequence she never forged the same strong bonds that exist between Jeannette, Brian, and Lori.