The Glass Castle is a nonfiction memoir published by American journalist Jeannette Walls. Published in 2005, book chronicles Walls and her three siblings’ nomadic and impoverished upbringing by their severely maladjusted parents. In recounting her childhood, Walls explores themes like Letting Go of Childhood Illusions, The Struggle to Understand a Parent’s Poor Choices, The Destructiveness of Codependent Relationships, and The Connection Between Poverty and Abuse.

A critical and popular success, The Glass Castle remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 260 weeks in hardcover and 440 weeks in paperback. In 2017, director Destin Daniel Cretton adapted the book into a film starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, and Woody Harrelson. Since the success of The Glass Castle, Walls has published several other books, including the novels Half Broke Horses (2009) and Hang the Moon (2023).

This study guide refers to the 2006 reprint edition published by Scribner.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of alcohol addiction and sexual assault of minors.

Summary

The year is 1963. Three-year-old Jeannette Walls lives in an Arizona trailer park with her older sister Lori, her younger brother Brian, and her parents Rex and Rose Mary, referred to henceforth as Mom and Dad. Dad is a talented and intelligent electrician who struggles to maintain a job due to his alcoholism, intransigence, and paranoia. He often makes grand plans that never come to fruition, like constructing a massive solar-powered home he calls the Glass Castle. Mom has a teaching degree and comes from a wealthy family, yet she prefers to paint and write all day, even if it means living in squalor.

After roughly two years of living a nomadic lifestyle across the Southwest US, the family settles in a small rental house in Battle Mountain, Nevada. Jeannette now has a baby sister, Maureen. Life is comparatively stable for about six months until Dad loses his job and turns to alcohol. Most days, the refrigerator and pantry are barren, forcing the kids to steal food from classmates and neighbors. Mom reluctantly gets a teaching job, and relative stability returns to the Walls household until a delinquent adolescent named Billy Deel attempts to rape eight-year-old Jeannette.

The following day, Billy attacks the children with a BB gun, and Jeannette shoots at Billy’s feet, driving him away. Later that night, the police arrive and demand the family speak to the magistrate in the morning. Due to Dad’s distrust of authority, he uproots the family again, this time to a large house in Phoenix that Mom recently inherited after the death of her wealthy mother.

Dad joins an electrician’s union and quickly finds work, but he loses a series of jobs until he is finally ejected from the union. His drinking worsens, culminating in a disastrous Christmas Eve bender during which he lights the Christmas tree on fire. At Jeannette’s insistence, Dad quits drinking for a few months but soon spirals back into alcoholism.

Broke and desperate for a way to manage Dad’s drinking, Mom uproots the family to Dad’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia, a deeply impoverished coal mining community. The family stays with Dad’s parents, Erma and Ted, until one day Jeannette catches Erma sexually assaulting Brian, which makes the kids wonder if Erma molested Dad too. Erma kicks the family out of her basement, and the Wallses move into a dilapidated house with no indoor plumbing and a hole-filled ceiling.

After a visit from a social worker, Jeannette all but forces Mom to get a teaching job to ensure the family stays together. Before long, Dad begins to siphon off the family’s budget to feed his addiction. Jeannette’s apologetic attitude toward her father finally crumbles when Dad uses Jeannette—now around 13 years old—to distract a man whom Dad aims to hustle at pool, and the man attempts to rape Jeannette. Jeannette, Lori, and Brian resolve to escape Welch.

Over the following year, the siblings save up money doing odd jobs. On the eve of Lori’s move to New York City, Dad steals all their savings. Lori finds a way to move to New York anyway, and about a year later, Jeannette follows her. They convince Brian and Maureen to move to New York as well. Lori works as an illustrator, Brian works as a foreman, Maureen enrolls in high school, and Jeannette works for a magazine while studying journalism at Barnard College.

Without warning, Mom and Dad arrive in New York. They stay at Lori’s place until Lori is forced to evict them. After living on the streets, Mom and Dad move into an abandoned tenement with other indigents. Around this time, Jeannette is aghast to learn that Mom owns $1 million worth of property in Texas but refuses to sell it. Meanwhile, Maureen spirals into mental illness and possibly drug abuse. She stabs Mom during an argument and is sentenced to a psychiatric facility upstate. Jeannette barely talks to her parents for a year, until Dad reveals he is dying. Two weeks later, he suffers a fatal heart attack.

In a brief coda, Mom, Lori, and Brian have Thanksgiving dinner at the home Jeannette owns with her husband, John. In a toast, Mom says life with Dad was “never boring.”