It’s not often I recommend an audiobook as the way through a book. There’s a big difference between listening to someone read a book to you, and letting the words on the page find their way into your mind and heart.
But “The Glass Castle” is an exception. Although I’d read Jeannette Walls’ bestselling memoir a couple of times, and seen the 2017 movie, hearing the author read her own story gave the memoir a new layer of meaning. Walls is a fine reader, and “The Glass Castle” is a fine memoir. Put the two together, and you’ve got the perfect companion for a driving tour of southern West Virginia coal country—or anywhere.
Walls writes with remarkable generosity about her childhood traveling the backroads of the Southwest and California with her ungrounded parents and three siblings. Her alcoholic father and her artist mother stayed in one place until the bill collectors came after them, and then they’d “skedaddle.” Always just one step ahead of the law, the Walls family finally drove east to Welch, West Virginia, where Rex Walls had grown up.
A third of the memoir takes place in 1970s Welch, and it’s a grim setting for Walls and her siblings. The coal industry was waning and the town was on the skids.
I won’t mince words: The description of the Walls’ family life in Welch as Rex Walls continued to drink and dream his life away and Rose Mary painted her way in and out of deep depression is hard to hear.
I won’t spoil the ending, in case there are a few out there who haven’t read “The Glass Castle.” Let’s just leave it like this: while the memoir leaves you terribly sorry for many things in Walls’ early life, it also leaves you in awe of her courageous determination.
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle. Scribner, 2005. 288 pp.
The story above first appeared in our November/ December 2021 issue.
