Book Report On The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle: Perseverance When it comes to parenting, many adults cannot see past the wrongs of their guidance. In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the topic of parenting is at the core of the book. The book takes place in 1960s - 1970s America, with the main character being the Author of the book. Jeannette Walls directly experienced everything in this book. She moved from state to state, and from town to town. Her parents were dysfunctional, and she grew up poor. Her parents continually abused her and her siblings mentally and physically as a means to instill resilience into all of them. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette serves as the result of the erratic parenting of Rex and Rose Mary Walls, highlighting how their methods

Throughout the book, there have been many instances where Rex has expected his kids to still support and follow him despite how he has treated them. Jeannette knew what her dad needed, and confronted her mother, as seen here, “MOM NEVER TOLD Dad that I’d urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was.” (Walls 189).Jeannette still thought of herself as her dad’s biggest and only supporter, due to the fact that Rex talked to her and was with her the most. Had Rex interacted with Lori or Brian the same way he did with Jeannette, they still would have supported him, too. While Rex did care for his kids in his own way, he is commonly shown to be extremely malicious when he wants to be. Rex was not afraid to crush the spirits of his children. This is demonstrated moreover in the following quote, “He bent down carefully, as if the floor beneath him could shift at any moment, picked up our ravaged piggy bank, and turned it over in his hands. Someone sure as hell gutted old Oz, didn't they?" He turned to me, and said, "I'm not a sham." Jeannette, do you know what happened? He was actually half grinning at me.”(Walls 229). Rex destroyed all the progress that Jeannette and Lori had made towards escaping Welch, and he was proud of it. He knew that they worked hard for the money, but he didn’t care how he felt. Rex Walls and Rosemary Walls loved their kids, but their love manifested in dangerous ways. The message received from analyzing the memoir and the way Jeannette speaks about her parents can be interpreted in different ways, but her true feelings towards the way she was treated in her childhood is extremely clear. Rex and Rosemary's efforts to foster resilience in their children came at the expense of their childhood experiences. The majority of their childhood experiences stemmed from the mentality that the