The Glass Castle

My sister is a flight attendant, and someone left a copy of the book The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, on the airplane my sister was working on one day. She picked it, took it home, and read it. Then she gave me a copy for my birthday. When I called to thank her, she said, “I thought our family was weird, but this book beats it.”

If you haven’t read it, The Glass Castle, now a movie, is so interesting and well-written and easy to read and tells a remarkable, true story. The writer’s parents thought they were being good parents, but the children were left to fend for themselves in dangerous, filthy, poverty conditions.

The book was a touch-point for my sister and I to start talking about our family and some of the strange things our parents did. It opened a dialog where we remembered events and things my dad had done when we were growing up that we’d never discussed before. My sister married when she was 18, nine months after graduating from high school. She left home and we never talked about our dad’s odd behavior. She didn’t have to deal with it anymore on an ongoing basis.

She gave me The Glass Castle in 2006. Since then, she and I have had more phone calls than ever (we live in different states) —lots of comments about what went on at family get togethers. And now that my dad’s been in the hospital a few times, we text about that, and now the dementia diagnosis.