The Glass Castle By Jannette Walls

In the memoir The Glass Castle, journalist Jannette Walls tells the bittersweet story of her childhood struggles and what it was like growing up in poverty. “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.” (pg.34) Walls grows up in a family trailed by broken homes, and she focuses on her untraditional childhood with her parents that were too self-centered and lazy to have steady jobs. Her and her siblings faced extreme poverty and adverse conditions, but her parents liked to pretend that their family life was just an “incredibly fun adventure”. During her childhood the concept of adventure was more than enough to eliminate many of her worries about her uncertain lifestyle. Throughout the memoir, Walls demonstrates the importance of

Jeannette Walls, by the end of the memoir, shows the importance of home and belonging, and that home doesn’t have to be a physical place, but instead can be the people and places around you. A sense of home and belonging is an abstract idea to Jannette and her siblings because the Walls family doesn’t have one concrete place to call home and are frequently moving from place to place to avoid debt collectors. Her and her siblings often don’t fit in, and they usually struggle to find a sense of belonging in school because they are constantly bullied and looked down on. According to The Importance of Belonging Across Life Kern says, “ Children are often quick to understand peer approval and inclusion once they start school”, while Janette rarely got approval from others and didn’t have many friends in school. However when Jannette gets a job working for the school newspaper, it becomes a place where she has a sense of belonging and identity because she could write without people