book review: the glass castle

The thing that kept me engaged was the surprise, the horrifying details of this childhood. Told in a plain way, this memoir recounts from earliest memory to recent past one woman's experiences in an extraordinarily eccentric father. She begins in medeas res, where we learn her parents are homeless and she is not, and we are whisked back to when she burned herself cooking hot dogs at the age of something like four. There is the standard formula: alcoholic father, abject poverty, a little crazy mother. I kept going because I was curious as to what would happen next, not because of the poetry of her language. Toward the end, we learn Walls is a journalist, and her paired down language makes sense--her matter of fact tone and even pacing. I would much rather return to Cherry or Liar's Club or Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.