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The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls Life Lessons

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The memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, takes place in the late 20th century. Jeannette Walls has lived a very colorful life. Although she is notable for her works of nonfiction, her upbringing was remarkable. One forgets The Glass Castle is not a work of fiction, but a detailed memoir of her life. In the memoir she writes about her experiences with her dysfunctional family. While constantly moving from place to place, she learns how to survive with very little materials. This meant having little to no toys, little amounts of food, and no house to sleep in. She learned how to enjoy herself with the things around her. She would go on adventures with her younger brother, collect rocks she believed were pretty, and be fascinated with fire. Her family taught her many lessons, some not traditional, but has kept her positive through the hard times. These experiences contributed to her life as a successful adult. Through the example her mother has shown, the lessons she taught herself, and the lessons …show more content…

From setting herself on fire to gunning down a pervert, she had showed her own independence and used her wisdom to solve each conflict she had ever encountered. At a young age of three, Jeannette Walls had set herself on fire while cooking hot dogs. Unknowing to her, while she bent down to offer the treat to her dog, her favorite pink dress caught on fire. This resulted in her having to get skin grafts and a newly developed fascination towards open flames. She’d watch her neighbor burn trash and immediately run over to stare at the red heat. Her fascination of the fire extended to setting her favorite tinkerbell doll on fire. At such a young age, she had realized that there is no point in hiding away from something that had hurt you. At such a young age, she had matured earlier than most children at nine years old. At such a young age, she had learned to get back up to her feet and walk

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The Glass Castle: A Summary In The Glass Castle: A Memoir, author Jeannette Walls belongs to a family that is constantly picking up and moving. Walls learned a lot from her dysfunctional family and used their example to motivate herself, ultimately leading to success and happiness in her adult life. Some of the greatest lessons came from Walls’ alcoholic father, as he taught her who to be and demonstrated at times who not to be. Originally, Walls remembers living in the desert as her father tried to make a fortune developing a product to find gold.

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In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls is forced to take care of herself from a very young age. Her parents are mentally unstable, and her dad regularly turns to alcohol. She is forced to move when any problems arise, which is often--from Battle Mountain to Phoenix to the small town of Welch, Virginia. Despite all of this, Jeannette has a memorable childhood, riding around on bikes, petting cheetahs, and declaring ownership of stars. Throughout her whole life, she is consistently the only one that believes in her reckless father.

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In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls, the author was most influenced by her time in Midland, California, as indicated by how she describes the scenery there. In Midland her she is taught many important life lessons mostly taught to her by her parents, Rex and Mary Rose. One of the lessons she is taught in Midland was hinted at in the beginning of the book. While traveling to Midland upon arriving the family runs into the beautiful scenery and one particular tree; the Joshua tree that caught Rose Mary’s eye.

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Aimee uses the imagery of our perceptions of what we as the reader have the effect of power to help characterize our characters. For the fire girl, she wrote “They put the fire girl in jail. She’s a danger, everyone said, she burns things, she burns people. She likes it.” (125) For the ice girl, things were better.

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830 Words | 4 Pages

The Glass Castle: Controversial Topics. The Glass Castle is a 2005 book by Jeannette Walls. The memoir explains the author’s life, growing up with her family most especially with her parents who could be described as nomads and deadbeats. Notwithstanding the difficult upbringing, her siblings and she had, Jeannette perseveres and becomes a successful Journalist living in New York City.

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Who is Jeannette Walls? She’s the author of The Glass Castle, a 2005 memoir about growing up with her family most especially with her parents who could be described as nomads and deadbeats. Notwithstanding the difficult upbringing, her siblings and she had, Jeannette perseveres and becomes a successful Journalist living in New York City. She explains how happy, but conflicted because her parents refuse money from her and live as homeless people. She writes the memoir to work through her feelings and share’s her story.

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“Believe in miracles…. Hope is never lost” (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland). Believing that the worst is behind them and that they will come upon a better life is the only way that Jeanette Wall’s family is able to stay afloat. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle, the symbol of hope is portrayed through a Glass Castle: a real home in which everyone is important and loved.

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In this world, there’s learning things the hard way and the easy way; in Jeannette Wall’s world, there’s only learning things the hard way. The Glass Castle is an adventurous story that reveals the painfully miserable story of Jeannette Walls. A selfish mother, a careless father, and terrible social encounters- these are some of the elements of a harsh reality Rex and Rose Mary Walls failed to shield their children from. Growing up poor was already difficult, but growing up with a selfish parent, specifically an unfeeling mom, made life hell for the Walls children. The family barely had one source of income from Rex Walls, and instead of helping out with the family’s finance issues, Rose Mary spent her days at home painting.

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My own personal mission statement: I aspire to live each day as if it were my last and to live a life full of passion, commitment, continuous improvement, personal growth and determination. Whilst doing so, I wish to learn to love myself, and only then will I automatically receive the love and appreciation that I desire from others. I aim to inspire and touch those around me and leave the world a better place than when I arrived. I will go through life with a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye, while I strive to fulfil my utmost potential.   My personal philosophy: My primary relationship is with myself - all others are mirrors of it.

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In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette manages to overcome her obstacles by realizing her independence. She is impacted by her parents’ incapabilities because she realizes that she has to do things differently than other children. Her father was a stubborn alcoholic who believed that: “[they] were all getting too soft, too dependent on creature comforts, and that [they] were losing touch with the natural order of the world”(Walls 106). He believes that every human should be independent and fend for themselves. By using the term “creature comforts”, her father is trying to separate himself from what he calls the civilians.

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773 Words | 4 Pages

Homeless: Choice or Chance? Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is a story of one unparalleled family who constantly is moving from one place to another. The family seeks shelter in abandoned houses in extremely slipshod conditions.

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799 Words | 4 Pages

The Glass Castle is the life story of a girl, Jeannette Walls, and her siblings who grew up in poverty unnecessarily because of their parents’ irresponsibility. One of its themes is that strength and perseverance can significantly improve your chance at success and your future. The Walls children did not allow their childhood struggles prevent them from creating better and brighter futures for themselves. They all grew up impressively sane considering their living conditions.

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528 Words | 3 Pages

I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, ‘This is Mrs. Tan’”(10). This shows how her mother affected her childhood in the way that she even had to talk for her so that other people would understand and take her seriously. The way Tan includes this quote shows that as a child she had to help her mom in many major ways. With this quote Tan affects the audience in the way that just because she was ashamed of her mother doesn’t mean that she didn’t care for her and that other people should do the same. “My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.

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1118 Words | 5 Pages

Jeannette Walls also uses the symbol of the Glass Castle, which develops throughout the memoir to show how she slowly loses trust in her father as she realises that she can not depend upon him or anyone else for happiness. The symbolism evolves throughout the memoir as Walls evolves as a person. In the beginning of the memoir, her description of the Glass Castle is naive and hopeful. Her naivety is most apparent when Walls writes, “All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert… All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that.

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849 Words | 4 Pages

It is evident that her childhood may have impacted her in a more severe psychological way. The book The Glass Castle is a very interesting narrative. The author Jeanette Walls is able to bring new light to circumstances that many people choose to ignore or overlook by writing about her own childhood. This gives the book a new perspective and allows the reader to gain insight.

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