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Nov 02, 2018IndyPL_SteveB rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
One of the great American memoirs. Walls was a New York City reporter and a graduate of Barnard College, when she finally told the astonishing truth about her childhood. She and her three siblings had spent a rootless and sometimes homeless childhood wandering the country in poverty as the children of an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother. Eventually they found a bit of a home in a small West Virginia coal-mining town, living in an abandoned house, while their father kept talking about the “glass castle” he would build for them. Walls was able to use this small amount of steadiness to move to New York City and start college; but her homeless parents followed her. This is a deeply fascinating and moving memoir that shows a very different side of the American Dream. It also has one of the most attention-grabbing first paragraphs ever: “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.”