“I Think I’m The Luckiest Person in The World”: Celebrating 20 Years of THE GLASS CASTLE
Never in her wildest dreams could Jeannette Walls have imagined telling her younger self that the story of her unconventional and adventurous childhood would be embraced, shared, and discussed the way it has been over the last 20 years. All she hoped to do was tell a good story that resonated with people, especially those whose young lives looked or felt like her own.
“People ask me, why don’t you hate your parents? Why aren’t you angry?” Jeannette Walls explained, reflecting upon her memoir’s 20th anniversary. “My mother told me, ‘You’re going to be famous one of these days. You’re going to write books.’ My dad told me I could do whatever I wanted. They were so friggin’ wise and insightful. They gave me what I needed.”
Walls laughs after she shares that, noting that in an ideal world, she would have had better food and better clothing.
“But a lot of people who got those things are much less happy than I am today. My parents gave me the tools that I needed, including what I now see as astonishing wisdom. If you get a love of education and a sense of self-esteem, those two things are priceless.”
The Glass Castle, with its story of growing up unconventionally, sometimes unstably, captivates and inspires readers to this day. Its themes of resilience and wonder, as well as its exploration of what it means to be a family and what it is to grow up and leave behind the past to build a different future, resonate with readers of all backgrounds and socioeconomic classes as much today as it did when it hit shelves 20 years ago.
Though the details may differ, both young and less-young readers who grew up in difficult situations have found themselves in the pages of this story.
The Origins of The Glass Castle
“I knew for a long time that I should write about this, I just didn’t, I didn’t see how I could do that and not ruin my life. I mean, I was the bonehead you see on television on the red carpet sticking my microphone into celebrities’ faces, asking them who designed their outfits. And I was just like, I have this great job. It seemed irreconcilable to me that I would do that and write this book as well. But the irony–some would say the hypocrisy–had not escaped me that I really was telling other people’s stories and could not tell my own. And, you know, I really grappled with it.”
In 2005, Amazon was not a dominant force in the book world. This was an era marked by three big chain bookstores — Borders Books, Barnes & Noble, and Waldenbooks — alongside independent bookshops. There was no BookTok, no Bookstagram, and no social media. Book discovery was a different experience.
Readers learned about what was new through browsing bookstores, as well as through what popped up on their favorite talk shows. This was the height of Oprah’s book club, where selected titles would sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a matter of days. There was still robust coverage of literature in well-established print outlets, including major newspapers.
Memoirs flourished early and mid-2000s. Titles like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors, and Dave Eggers’s The Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius ran up the bestsellers list, while backlist titles, including Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, were not only continuing to be read but were also being picked up and shared by book clubs across the country. Karr’s memoir, well regarded among literary critics, helped to kickstart demand for such true life stories.
“The Glass Castle published at the height of the love affair between American readers and memoir,” said Nan Graham, editor of Walls’s memoir, as well as both McCourt’s and Karr’s. “All three memoirs are a triumph of voice and witness. All three end when the writers are still in their teens. The reader gets to see how a person becomes.”
Become Walls’s memoir did.
Walls wrote the first draft of The Glass Castle in six weeks. She admits that the draft was “bad, very bad,” but that it helped get the story out on paper. When she sent it to her agent, it became clear that Walls’s background in journalism benefitted her writing and storytelling skills — but it also held her back.
“I wrote very journalistically, very arm’s length, you know, very stilted,” Walls said.
In working with her agent, Walls began to break down some of the walls she’d built through the writing process–and through the process of growing up, too.
“[S]he said, you have to take off the cellophane. This is about how you really felt and how it affected you,” Walls said. She didn’t believe her childhood had affected her at all and that she “was perfectly normal.” But this, Walls realized, was because she was drafting her memoir as an adult looking backward. Shifting to the voice of a child and putting it in first-person, rather than at arm’s length through an adult’s third-person perspective, changed the experience altogether.
The Glass Castle’s voice is one of the book’s most memorable and beloved aspects. It’s one that balances a childhood innocence and naivety about the world and what the world perceives as “normal” with that of an adolescent coming of age and recognizing the position she’d been put in of having to parent herself and grow up much sooner than her peers.
Walls worked hard to see her parents through the eyes of her five-year-old self, which helped her in not passing judgment on them throughout the process. This perspective is one that Walls returns to and shares with her readers, particularly those who experienced difficult or unique childhoods like her own.
Graham received the book as a full manuscript, and though it required some editing — a task in which Graham called Walls “a total pro,” — the bulk of the work in shaping The Glass Castle related to the perspective through which the story is told and where it comes to its conclusion.
“Jeannette has always described The Glass Castle as a ‘Fine White Trash’ story. She writes about living with no running water, electricity cut off because Dad drank the money that should have paid the bill. But she is never self-pitying, never a victim, always so singularly brave, so resilient, so profoundly forgiving,” Graham said.
It took about five years to get from that first draft to the final form of the story that readers know today.
Graham and Walls had very different experiences during the publishing process. Graham, who had been in the business for years and recognized the power this story would have on readers, was fully prepared. She knew the book would resonate with readers at that time, and the market was prime for such a memoir.
“We had a great memoir to send out into the world at a time when the appetite for memoir was voracious. And the booksellers were all in,” Graham said. “We were pretty sanguine. It took me a while to understand that Jeannette had a completely different concern.”
Walls, on the other hand, was worried sick about what the people in her new adult life in New York City might think. She worked as a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com at the time, lived in a tony part of the city, and dressed to the nines as she interviewed famous celebrities on the red carpet — a far cry from the life she’d grown up in and written about. Her friends and colleagues had no idea about her past.
“I was under my desk in a fetal position,” Walls said. “I was like, they’re going to make fun of me. I was just thinking about like, what the hell am I doing? Why? Why? I’ve got this great job. I can go around asking celebrities about their clothes. Why am I doing this idiotic thing? I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking big picture at all.”
The secret wouldn’t stay such for long. After The Glass Castle hit shelves, Walls was talking about her memoir with Oprah, Vanity Fair, and more.
“[Jeannette] believed that the moment the book was published, she would lose the New York friends who knew nothing of her background and assumed that because she’d gone to Barnard and wore pearls and lived on Park Avenue, she’d been born into privilege,” Graham added. “She thought that when they learned she was ‘white trash,’ they’d dump her.”
That was not what happened.
“They turned out to be better than that,” Graham said.
The book made an impact on those who knew and worked with Walls almost immediately.
“I was on the red carpet right after the book came out and a very well-known person who I will not name asked me to turn off the microphone,” Walls said. “That person said I want to thank you for telling your story. I bought several copies of your book for my friends who do not understand how I could love an alcoholic. My father’s a lot like yours and I love the man and they do not understand how.”
The Glass Castle hardcover spent 260 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List and, when published in paperback, spent an additional 440 weeks on the list, keeping a spot there until October 2018. The book received numerous accolades upon publication, including an Alex Award from the American Library Association, a Books for Better Living Award, a Christopher Award, and more. It was adapted into a feature film in 2017, starring Brie Larson as Walls.
The book sold over seven million copies and has been translated into over 31 different languages.
“Honestly, it’s been one shock after another. Just the goodness and the kindness of the people who I encounter and the way they share their stories. I don’t wanna name drop, but just the people who I’ve heard enjoying the book, it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s just so weird,” Walls said.
On Mom and Dad Walls’s Parenting
Over the course of the book’s 20 years, one of the most heated debates about the story is whether or not Mom or Dad Walls are good parents. Both Moms and Dad are in and out of jobs, and both share fanciful notions of the future “good life” openly with their children — without any real semblance of how the whole family will achieve that dream.
Throughout Walls’s life, her mother struggled to find and keep a job. Sometimes she was at home more than in a workplace and other times, she was working as a teacher, though not always the strongest nor most typical.
Wall’s father struggled with substance abuse throughout her life. For her 10th birthday, Walls asks her father to stop drinking. And he does, even though he suffers from a painful withdrawal. Though he’s unable to stay sober, Walls makes clear through her prescient voice that he cared enough to try, even if he never quite succeeded the way she nor her siblings wished.
“We shape our truth by which stories we tell and how we choose to tell them. So I was trying to be as fair to my parents as I could,” Walls said. “At the same time, I am bringing my perspective. But I wanted the reader to be able to draw their own conclusion about whether or not these were good parents.”
Arguments about Walls’s parents are regular features at events and book clubs. To some, her parents were criminals who evaded the law for far too long. At times, they put their own selfish interests and schemes above the well-being of their children. To other readers, Walls’s parents are seen as flawed but with good hearts whose love for their children was evident.
Walls says both sides of the argument are right. It’s a matter of how the story is told and how the story is then interpreted.
“My very favorite memory from my entire childhood is when Dad gave me a star, and I chose a planet instead. I love that gift so much every night, I look for Venus all the time. I’m like, ‘oh man, that’s mine.’ I love the story, and I told it at my father’s funeral. And after I finished telling the story, my older sister, Lori, folds her arms and says, ‘isn’t that like that sorry SOB dad of ours to go give away something that doesn’t belong to him in the first place?’,” Walls shared. “I thought about that a whole lot while I was trying to write this story because Lori is absolutely right. Dad giving me Venus was a meaningless gesture.”
“But I’m right, too. It was an inspiration and a precious treasure,” she adds. “Meanwhile, my brother does a hilarious impersonation of dad being drunk and giving us stars and planets. So you have one incident and you have three stories. One is inspirational, one is tragic, and the third is comic.”
Whether or not Walls’s parents were good is one of the points in the story that has connected with so many for so long. It’s not just whether or not Mom and Dad Walls were good. Mom and Dad Walls reflect back to many readers the difficulties and flaws readers have seen in their own parents.
It’s what’s helped those readers be seen, often for the first time in their lives.
“So many people out there with rough lives, they want to feel pride and love for their parents and outsiders see, who are those white trash or ghetto or whatever people? Why don’t they live like we do? I think that struck a chord with a lot of young people,” Walls said. “They’ve come up and told me their stories. They’ll say ‘my daddy drives an old beater of a car and he’s a meth addict, and I figured if you can love your daddy, I can love my daddy too.’”
The Perennial Censorship of The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle’s legacy can’t be disentangled from its near-consistent appearance on most challenged and most banned books lists. Though the story is that of Walls’s life, its themes of family difficulty, substance use, sexual assault, and sexual violence have been pointed to as reasons the book should not be permitted in public schools and public libraries. The unfiltered language has also played a major role in its censorship.
One of the first recorded challenges of the book came in 2009. A parent at a San Clarita, California, school took issue with the book being used in an English honors class alongside another modern classic, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees. The parent cited several of the above reasons for her disapproval of the book’s inclusion, as well as noted its criticisms of Christianity.
2010 saw several more formal complaints about The Glass Castle, primarily in public schools. The book had become more commonly used in advanced literature classes as part of a unit on memoir, as was the case in the Hollis-Brookline School District (NH). In that case, angry parents simply sent two paragraphs from a section of the book where Walls is assaulted by her uncle — a moment where Walls realizes how alone she is in her world without grown-ups there to protect her — to district officials. Contextless excerpts used to shock school administration as a means of complaining about books is a tale as old as time.
Between 2010 and 2020, The Glass Castle was the 17th most banned book across the US. In 2012, alone, it reached the status of ninth most banned book. It is still a frequent target today, with specific instances of removal recorded in Iowa, Florida, Texas, and Virginia schools, amid unprecedented attacks on books that center stories by and about those who have experienced any type of marginalization.
Walls recalls the first time she heard of her book being banned. It took place in a well-off Dallas suburb, where a single parent complained about the scene with her uncle.
“The other parents and the teachers and, God bless them, the students all got together and said, we are so privileged. We need to know about people like this. It’s very important for us to read these stories,” Walls shared. Advocates for the book got the ban overturned.
Walls was then invited to talk with the students at the school. She recalls another author telling her that the students were spoiled, having grown up in wealth.
“But we had the best time. We had this long, rambling conversation about what children owe parents, what parents owe children and about how you turn hardships into your advantage. They were open-minded. They were smart. They were clever. They were empathetic. I just love these kids.”
Walls continues, “But then one of them hung back and thanked me for the book because this young person’s uncle had behaved inappropriately. The book gave that person the courage to call out their uncle. We poor folk have not cornered the market on creepy uncles.”
As much as parents think that by removing books with difficult themes or concepts is a form of protection, it’s not. It further isolates them. For many kids, that means never quite having their experiences seen or heard and never finding their voice to share those stories and get the help they so deserve.
“The more meaningful way to protect kids is to empower them by giving them the tools and the wherewithal to encounter the inevitable difficulties that we will all have to deal with,” said Walls.
The Books That Shaped Walls and Walls’s Impact on Other Writers
Anyone who has read The Glass Castle knows that one of Walls’s passions — as well as one of her escapes — is reading and books. It comes as little surprise that she recalls specific books that were inspirations to her throughout the writing process.
“I didn’t have that many friends growing up. I wasn’t very cute and I wasn’t popular. I dressed ugly and the truth is I probably smelled a little funky,” Walls says with a chuckle. “I read this book about this woman who was born around the turn of the century and she wasn’t very cute.”
That book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, helped her feel less alone in her life. Francie Nolan did not have fancy clothes, either, and her father struggled with alcoholism, which resonated with Walls. So, too, did the fact Francie turned to reading and writing to help lift her from poverty.
“It was so inspirational for me,” said Walls. “Francie Nolan was my best friend.”
Just a couple of years later, Walls would find more connection in another classic of literature. This time, it was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
“I always thought the Joad family would not have made fun of the Walls family. So reading these books about people in tough circumstances and making it out, was incredibly inspirational to me.”
Walls added that she had a little fiction crush on Tom Joad, too.
Walls’s book has itself been a source of inspiration for writers throughout the last two decades; it’s also been a book easily comparable to other bestsellers, including Tara Westover’s harrowing memoir Educated. One author who credits Walls’s story as helpful for her own is Jeannette McCurdy and her blockbuster memoir of a difficult childhood, I’m Glad My Mom Died.
“The details can be different but we all have so much in common. So here, [McCurdy’s] a freaking child star. She’s beautiful and petite and blonde and she’s on television. . . and you just don’t know what people’s stories are,” Walls says, emphasizing how differently her childhood was from McCurdy’s. “McCready did such a beautiful job of taking people into this world and explaining the pressure and the difficulties and the confusion. What a gift. If my gift can help her give that gift to the world, that’s the beauty and the magic of storytelling.”
The Glass Castle Today
“It’s hard being an adolescent. You want to be popular. You want to be accepted. All of these things that make you different, you’re just painfully aware of. What I hope is that by discussing these differences and these similarities, we understand that that’s what makes this crazy quilt of humanity so beautiful is the similarities and the differences. And it’s celebrating that. And that is why we tell our stories.”
In 2005, it would have been difficult to predict that The Glass Castle would take on the life it has. Certainly, Walls’s editor knew the book would be successful, but it’s grown well beyond those early expectations.
“That Jeannette’s book returns to the bestseller list every summer because it’s on high school reading lists is a triumph. Those young readers get a spectacularly good story about a kid who dealt with so much trouble, shame, and deprivation, and made it through. They can do it, too,” Graham said.
The Glass Castle not only commonly appears in high school curriculum. It’s also widely assigned in college courses, ranging from English 101 and writing courses to classes on social work, psychology, and more. The Glass Castle appears on over 460 course syllabi on OpenSyllabus alone.
Walls’s memoir is the type of story that creates a cross-generational experience. Parents who read the book growing up on their own or in the classroom are able to connect with their own teenagers about the story, as much as it is the kind of book tailor-made for book clubs or recommended reading lists. The Glass Castle captures childhood in a way that connects with young readers, as much as it connects with older readers reflecting upon their youth.
It begs for conversation.
Though Walls did not see herself writing more books after The Glass Castle, she did. Her second book, Half-Broke Horses, is a fictionalized memoir based on the life of her grandmother. It was her mother who encouraged Walls to write that story after she came to live with Walls and her husband, and it was her mother who helped provide the template for the story about her intrepid grandmother. Walls would then write The Silver Star, a fictionalized take on events that happened in the town she grew up in. Both follow-up books were mostly nonfiction, with details sketched in to tell the whole story. Walls wrote both in the first person to give her the ability to fill in those gaps, and though both were categorized as fiction, Walls never quite saw herself as anything more than a truth-teller — her background in journalism, which had helped her in writing The Glass Castle, served her well with those two books, too. She was certainly not a novelist.
But readers kept asking for a novel.
“It was one reader at an event that I was at, where I said, “I have no imagination. I don’t make things up.’ This reader said, ‘Ma’am, forgive me. I think you have a fabulous imagination. You’re afraid of creativity.’”
The seeds for her first novel, Hang The Moon, were planted. The book hit shelves in March 2023.
Walls wrote The Glass Castle to face her past head on and to stop being ashamed of it. While she’s delighted it has taken on such a massive life, it’s the impact of the book on other people that has made its legacy so meaningful for her.
“The fact that The Glass Castle actually helped other people, whether it’s that young man who thought it was a fine white trash book, or the popular cheerleaders decided to be nicer to the unpopular girl in class, or Jennette McCurdy, if people find hope and enlightenment or direction or lessons or whatever, that so far exceeds any hope that I had for my raggedy little story,” she said.
The book’s popularity is far from its end.
“The universality of this story is not going to diminish — it’s about triumph over adversity, about resilience, courage, compassion, and about how kids are often better than the adults around them,” Graham said. “And what I haven’t said yet: IT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH.”
Indeed, not only is the book full of heart and humor, but so, too, is Walls herself. Graham described her laugh as “a B12 shot in any conversation,” and she could not be more spot on. Throughout our interview, Walls’s bright spirit was infectious and her storytelling made what was initially intended to be a 20-30 minute conversation last for over an hour. Picking and choosing which stories to include here and which would be left out made for difficult work.
Walls’s love for The Glass Castle, for her readers, and for those who’ve yet to pick up her book is undeniable.
