The Glass Castle: A Memoir

The glass castle : a memoir / Jeannette Walls. -- New York : Scribner, 2006.
288 p. ; 21 cm.
ISBN: 9780743247542 (pbk.)

1. Children of alcoholics -- United States -- Biography. 2. Homeless persons -- Family relationships -- New York (State) -- New York. 3. Poor -- West Virginia -- Welch -- Biography. 4. Problem families -- United States -- Case studies. 5. Problem families -- West Virginia -- Welch -- Case studies. 6. Walls, Jeannette.

362.82092

The first thing Jeannette Walls remembers from her childhood was being on fire. The three-year old was standing on a chair boiling hot dogs when her dress caught on fire At the hospital the nurses wanted to know what a three-year-old was doing cooking hot dogs. “’Mom says I’m mature for my age,’ I told them, ‘and she lets me cook for myself a lot.’ Two nurses looked at each other, and one of them wrote something down on a clipboard. I asked what was wrong. Nothing, they said, nothing.”

Pulling up stakes and doing the skedaddle in the early hours of the morning was a regular part of her family’s nomadic existence going from small desert town in Arizona, Nevada and California, until her father’s inability and her mother’s unwillingness to keep a job landed them in Phoenix living off the inheritance of Jeannette’s maternal grandmother, and when that ran out to the home of her paternal grandmother in Welch, West Virginia. From there one by one, her older sister, Jeannette, her younger brother, and youngest sister set out for New York to find work, education and their own lives.