The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

A beautiful, ugly, and moving story of "real life." Jeannette details the fun of her childhood, moving from town to town, leaving the creditors behind. When she and her siblings started going to school they figured out that life for most people was not like the game their mother played with them (ie: "Our new home was one of the oldest in town, Mom proudly told us, with a real frontier quality to it.")

Jeanette Wells tells an incredible story that takes their family across the nation and through the depths of poverty. She eventually becomes a NY Time Bestselling author, and the story of her journey into the real world is incredible enough to be almost unbelievable.

There is some moral depravity in the book, but it is discussed in a matter-of-fact way, and in such a way as to be valuable to those who might be embarking on the world for themselves. There is a plentiful amount of swearing from the father throughout the book.

Spoiler alert: don't read the remainder of this post if you don't want the plot revealed.

I understand that there are many people who live in poverty because they have to. I was disgusted that the mother allowed her children to paw through the school garbage to find food their friends had thrown away, when she had inherited land that she chose not to sell. Even if it is a Family Law that land doesn't get sold, you sell your land to shelter, feed and clothe your children. It's just what you do. Even if you don't know how much land there is, where it is, or what it is worth, you find out and sell it.

I struggle, as does Jeanette, to understand her mother, who had no comprehension that motherhood is a divine calling and one of the most important, rewarding, and fulfilling things that can be done on this earth. Mother would rather paint (and invest in paints, mind you) than care for or attend her children. I personally am all about children being independent and learning to do things for themselves. Half of her behavior toward her children when they were little was not shocking to me at all. But during that time they at least had food in their tummies and a warm place to sleep. The way she abandoned them when they were old enough to scrounge for themselves was appalling to me. That she ate food herself instead of sharing it with her children, slept in a warmer, drier room, and quit the job that was their only sustenance because she wanted to paint more - just made me ache for the children, ache in the depths of my heart and soul.

The climax of the book, to me, occurred when Jeanette was in college. Her parents had followed the four kids to New York. The kids all worked and lived in real apartments and cared about the younger ones enough to help them get started in their lives there. The parents were homeless and liked it that way.

"You can't just live like this," Jeanette told her mom.
"Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure." And they stayed that way, despite their children offering to help them in various ways.

Then Jeanette had the following experience in class:

One day Professor Fuchs asked if homelessness was the result of drug abuse and misguided entitlement programs, as the conservatives claimed, or did it occur, as the liberals argued, because of cuts in social-service programs and the failure to create economic opportunity for the poor? Professor Fuchs called on me.

I hesitated. "Sometimes, I think, it's neither."

"Can you explain yourself?"

"I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want."'

 Professor Fuchs questions her further, and she says that if some people just worked they would be fine.

Professor Fuchs walked around from behind her lectern "What do you know about the lives of the underprivileged?" she asked. She was practically trembling with agitation. "What do you know about the hardships and obstacles that the underclass faces?" 

The other students were staring at me.

"You have a point," I said.

At the time I read it, I was infuriated that she was too worn out from her life to argue the truth of her stance. But she took care of it - she has argued it in a much more powerful way through this eye-opening, heart-rending, bestselling novel.