PDF Summary:The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle is the harrowing tale of Jeannette Wall’s life growing up in poverty with wayward parents. Jeannette and her siblings were often left to fend for themselves as their parents engaged in alcoholic binges or flights of fancy. The siblings ultimately resented their parents’ neglect and became independent, moving far away.
Following the Walls family through the desert to the coal-mining region of West Virginia to the fast-paced life of New York City, this memoir explores the nature of family, loyalty, and tragedy and what it takes to survive together and apart.
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On another occasion, Jeannette fell out of the family’s car while driving down the highway. She sat on the side of the road for what felt like hours waiting for her parents to notice she was gone and come back for her. When they finally did, the family had a good laugh about it.
Jeannette was also the target of bullying and aggression often. In one location out west, a group of older girls beat her up after school. At another school in West Virginia, she was beat up every day for being poor and dirty. In Battle Mountain, a delinquent child took a liking to Jeannette and tried to sexually assault her when she was eight years old. After she got away, the boy came to her house and shot at her and her siblings with a BB gun at close range.
Her parents never took these incidents very seriously, and Jeannette and her siblings grew close as they looked out for each other and kept each other safe.
Family Drama
Rex and Rose Mary fought often. Once, Rex tried to run down a pregnant Rose Mary with his car in the desert after they’d argued about how far along she was. There was the time Rose Mary and Rex argued about money and whose responsibility it was to support the family. The fight was so loud, it brought out the entire neighborhood and ended with Rose Mary dangling from an upstairs window after she tried to jump out.
There were also times when the fights were started by Rex after stumbling home drunk. He’d scream at the kids and destroy the house, and often, he became violent and threatening to Rose Mary. For example, after the family had moved to a house in Phoenix that Rose Mary had inherited, Rex broke all of the family heirlooms and threw Rose Mary on the ground. They each grabbed a knife, but within minutes, they were laughing and back in love.
Rex’s drinking caused many problems for his family, but there were a few stints of sobriety along the way, such as when Jeannette told him her birthday wish was for him to stop drinking. He detoxed in an upstairs bedroom and stayed sober for a couple of months, but he always fell off the wagon.
After the family moved to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia, his drinking became a full-time job. The town was small and blue collar, and the family lived in a dilapidated house on the side of the hill. The family would stay in that house until each child eventually packed up and moved to New York City as teenagers. But over the years, the house had fallen down around them. By the time Jeannette left for New York at seventeen, the only way in or out of the house was through the back window.
A Fresh Start
Lori and Jeannette couldn’t wait to get out of Welch and away from their parents. Lori was a talented artist and moved to New York City after graduating from college. She found a job, took art classes, and saved money for an apartment. A few years later, no longer able to take her mother’s indifference and laziness and Rex’s destructive behavior, Jeannette moved after her junior year and joined her sister. Brian would follow a year later, and Maureen a few years after when she was twelve.
In New York, the Walls children moved forward and started to make something of their lives. Jeannette had found a penchant for journalism back in high school. After a year of interning at a low-level newspaper in Brooklyn, she enrolled at Barnard College and took a job as an editorial assistant for a high-profile magazine. Brian was training to become a police officer, Lori was working as an illustrator for a comic book company, and Maureen was attending public school in Midtown.
Not long after Maureen left home, Rex and Rose Mary followed their children to New York. They stayed with Lori for a while and lived in a van for a few months, but eventually, they became homeless. Despite all of their children’s efforts to try to help them, Rex and Rose Mary liked the freedom of homelessness. It was another adventure for two adventure junkies.
Jeannette radiated with shame about the way her parents lived. She felt guilty, embarrassed, and burdened, and she struggled to find contentment with her life, even after marrying a wealthy man and moving into a swanky Park Avenue apartment. Her career had taken off after college, and she was part of the New York social scene, writing columns about the comings and goings of high society. Whenever someone asked about her background or parents, she lied.
The Ride Comes to an End
All of the Walls children were adults and thriving in their chosen professions, all but Maureen. Maureen had never truly fit into the family because of how much younger she was than the other children, and she struggled to find direction in New York. She dropped out of college, moved into a tenement building where her parents were squatting, and eventually was sent to a mental hospital in Upstate New York after stabbing Rose Mary. When she was released, she moved to California and never came back.
During one winter in New York, Rex contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for six weeks. He was sober again for the first time since Phoenix and moved Upstate to get off the streets and stay that way. But Rose Mary didn’t want to be alone when winter rolled around again, so he moved back to the city and regained his old habits. All of the drinking and smoking finally caught up to him, and he died at the age of fifty-nine.
Without their patriarch, the Walls family became estranged. Brian got married, had a daughter, and became a detective in the NYPD. Jeannette divorced her first husband, remarried, and moved Upstate to a large farmhouse, where she wrote this book. Five years after Rex’s death, the family came back together to celebrate Thanksgiving, minus Maureen. They reminisced about their wild past and agreed that life with Rex Walls was never dull. At this, at least, they all could finally agree.
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PDF Summary Introduction: A Familiar Face
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Jeannette and Rose Mary met for lunch a few days later, and the conversation was as random and ludicrous as ever. Her mother had cleaned up a bit, wearing a sweater with fewer stains and men’s shoes. Rose Mary launched into a discussion about the Picasso retrospective she’d seen. She didn’t think much of Picasso.
Jeannette tried to offer her parents assistance, but Rose Mary pushed the idea away. They didn’t need Jeannette’s money. Rose Mary said if Jeannette wanted to help her, she could buy her an electrolysis treatment because looking good raises your spirits.
PDF Summary Part I: The Wild West ︱Chapter 1: The Arizona Desert
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Paradise Lost
Whenever Jeannette’s family came to visit, they were loud and unruly. Her parents would argue, sing, laugh, and make a general ruckus that earned admonishments from the staff.
Rex was always the more gregarious. He threatened to beat up the nurses and doctors if Jeannette wasn’t being treated right. Her mother wasn’t much better. When she found out about the nurse and the chewing gum, she went into a tirade about what a disgusting habit chewing gum was. She was going to give that nurse the what-for.
Rex thought it would have been better if Jeannette had seen the witch doctor they’d taken her older sister to after she was bitten by a scorpion. He said she’d heal faster than being stuck in here with the quacks they called doctors. In fact, Rex started a fight with one of the doctors. He argued that keeping her in bandages didn’t allow the burns to breathe. The doctor countered that the bandages warded off infections. Rex pulled his fist back in anticipation for a punch, but the doctor backed away. A security guard escorted the family out of the hospital.
The next time the family visited Jeannette, Brian’s head was wrapped in a blood-soaked...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: In Search of a Home
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A couple of nights after the flaming cake, Jeannette’s parents came back from the casino in a hurry. They said it was time to skedaddle again. The casino was on to Rex’s system, and they had to put as much distance as they could between them and the mafia hot on his trail. Her mother wanted to live near the ocean, so they headed for California.
San Francisco
Jeannette’s fascination with fire was the catalyst for another Walls family skedaddle shortly after arriving in San Francisco. Rose Mary didn’t want to stay in what she called “tourist traps” near the wharf, so the family found an affordable hotel in the Tenderloin District, where many of the residents were prostitutes.
The children were often left alone in the hotel while their parents went in search of investment capital for the Prospector. Jeannette found a box of wooden matches and took them to the bathroom. She built a mound of toilet paper in the toilet, set it on fire, and flushed only when the flames were lapping high out of the basin.
A few nights later, Jeannette woke up to a fire in their room. The curtains were flaming a few steps from her bed. Her parents weren’t there, and she couldn’t...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: A Small Reprieve in Battle Mountain
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The problem was the Walls’ inability to budget. Their habit of gorging themselves when food was available led to larger bills at the commissary. Rex’s salary would run out before the month was up, and sometimes he owed money.
However, one place money wasn’t going to was the bars. Rex had curbed his drinking, choosing instead to stay home with his family spread around the room reading. A large dictionary was opened in the middle of the room for the kids to look up unfamiliar words. If Jeannette didn’t agree with a definition, she and Rex would write letters to the publishers in protest.
A Normal Childhood
Jeannette and her siblings were enrolled in the elementary school in Battle Mountain. She entered the second grade, and although she was light years ahead of her class in reading and math, she kept quiet. She’d learned what being the class pet could lead to in Blythe.
The other kids were mostly sons and daughters of miners and gamblers, and they also lived in the Tracks. The Walls children finally had other kids to play with. Rex would often play with them, and the neighborhood children sometimes asked for Rex instead of his kids.
**Rose Mary didn’t set limits...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: A New Beginning in Phoenix
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There was also a termite infestation. Rex discovered the extent of the problem after Lori’s foot pushed through the floorboards one night. But the problem was too large to fix, so they ignored the pests and crashed through multiple points in the floor. Whenever a new hole opened up, Rex would hammer an empty beer can over it as a patch.
An Eye-Opening Discovery
Jeannette, Brian, and Lori enrolled in Emerson Public School, a nice school in a nice neighborhood with lush grass and banana trees. All three children were placed in gifted reading groups upon entry. The school also had a nurse, and the Walls children were given vision and hearing exams for the first time. This was how they found out Lori was nearsighted.
Rose Mary wouldn’t hear of getting glasses for Lori. She thought glasses only made poor eyesight worse and that Lori needed to strengthen her eyes through use. But the school said Lori couldn’t attend without them.
When Lori received her glasses, she looked at the world outside with wonder. She’d never seen leaves on trees, words on billboards, or birds in the distance. She was seeing the world for the first time, and she cried with joy.
**Lori became...
PDF Summary Part II: The Other Side of the World ︱Chapter 5: Welch, West Virginia
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As they drove through town, Jeannette tried to make friendly gestures to people she saw on the street, but none of them smiled back. Rose Mary seemed giddy. She reckoned there were no other artists in Welch. Her career could really take off there.
The Outsiders
Rose Mary walked Brian and Jeannette to the local elementary school the next morning. She explained to the principal that they’d forgotten their records but assured him they were both bright students. When the principal asked Jeannette what eight times seven was, she couldn’t understand his hillbilly accent. Rose Mary translated, and Jeannette shouted the answer. Similarly, the principal didn’t understand her accent. He said the children seemed slow and had speech problems, so he placed them in classes for kids with learning disabilities.
The school was a far cry from Emerson in Phoenix. There was no playground equipment or free bananas. The winter winds were already whirling through. Rose Mary had purchased used winter coats, but Jeannette’s didn’t have any buttons. As they waited outside for the morning bell, she wrapped her arms around her front to keep the coat closed.
On Jeannette’s first day of fifth...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Learning to Survive
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Despite her antics, Rose Mary was making money, and her paycheck was a blessing to the household. On payday, they’d cash the check and pay off the monthly bills. Rose Mary put space heaters and a refrigerator on layaway and paid a little each month. They’d stock up on groceries and have enough money left over to survive the rest of the month.
But soon the food was gone, and so was the money. Jeannette could never get a straight answer from Rose Mary about where the money went. She knew Rose Mary had to buy little gifts for herself, things she said made you feel rich, like crystal vases. But even accounting for those splurges, there should have been money left over. Jeannette and Lori came up with a budget and tried to persuade Rose Mary to let them handle the finances, but she refused. By the end of each month, Jeannette was back to digging in garbage cans for lunch.
Personal Improvements
Life changed for Jeannette when she entered Welch High School as a seventh grader. She wanted to belong to a club where people would accept her. She thought about track, but Rose Mary wouldn’t pay for the uniform, so she started working for the school newspaper, The Maroon Wave....
PDF Summary Chapter 7: A Light at the End of the Tunnel
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The night she was finishing the bust, everyone cheered her on. Rex stumbled in later, drunk and surly. He told Lori that Shakespeare was a phony and hadn’t written any of his plays. He took one look at the bust, then used his thumb to wipe off Shakespeare’s lying mouth. He said he would help her write a paper exposing Shakespeare as a fraud that would set the literary world on fire.
Lori was broken. She didn’t have the heart to fix the bust and smashed it into a blob of clay.
The Final Blow
Lori and Jeannette decided Lori would still move, even if she hadn’t found a school to attend. She’d work and figure it out along the way.
As usual, Rex didn’t understand why everyone was so bent out of shape about the bust. He said he wasn’t trying to ruin Lori’s plans for New York, but he added that she was a fool for wanting to go. She’d end up living on the streets, becoming a drug addict, and working as a prostitute. When everyone ignored him, he said he didn’t know why he even bothered to come home.
By the time Lori’s graduation came around, the three kids had saved up nine months of earnings. Jeannette came home to add her recent babysitting pay to Oz and found it...
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PDF Summary Part III: Independence︱Chapter 8: New York City
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One day, someone mentioned something about the Progressive Era during an interview, and Jeannette had to look it up in the encyclopedia when she returned to the office. Mike suggested she might enjoy college so she could learn all the things she didn’t know. He added that a college degree would help her land a better job. He said she was always welcome at The Phoenix if she ever wanted to come back.
Leave No One Behind
Jeannette and Brian had been corresponding through letters since she left. Although life was moving forward for her and Lori, things in Welch were getting increasingly worse.
Rex was always drunk except when he was thrown in jail for a night. Rose Mary was successful at living for herself and was more or less withdrawn from the family. Maureen was practically living at her friends’ homes. And Brian was sleeping underneath an inflatable raft because the roof in their bedroom had collapsed from water damage.
Jeannette and Lori wondered if Brian would like the city. He was comfortable in the outdoors and never seemed to have a problem with Welch. Also, unlike the girls, Brian had friends. But after Jeannette called and told him about the apartment and...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: All Grown Up
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Jeannette and Eric were married four years after she moved in. Their life together was stable and uneventful, and that was just the right speed for Jeannette.
The Awful Truth
A few months after Jeannette’s wedding, Rose Mary’s brother, Jim, died. Grandma Smith had left the other half of the Texas land to Jim. Rose Mary wanted to make sure the land stayed in the family, so she told Jeannette to ask Eric to help her buy it. Jeannette was happy to help and said she had some money saved up. All she needed was the land value to start the process. Rose Mary was cagey, as she had been their whole lives about the land. But when Jeannette pressed her, she said she needed a million dollars.
Jeannette nearly fell off her seat. She thought about how her uncle’s land was the same size as her mother’s. She asked if Rose Mary’s land was worth the same amount, but Rose Mary said she didn’t know. She’d never had it appraised, but she guessed it was more or less the same.
Jeannette was floored. Her mind raced through all those years without food or heat or water or clothes. She thought about the years her parents had been on the streets and squatting in an abandoned building. **Was it...
PDF Summary Epilogue: A New Reality
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The family reminisced about the craziness of the past and all of Rex’s antics, including those that showcased how much he cared about his kids. John proposed a toast to Rex, and Rose Mary raised her glass. She said, “Life with your father was never boring.” Jeannette could almost hear her father laughing from wherever he was.