The Glass Castle Summary

The Glass Castle has no numbered chapters at all. It is divided into five named parts, and within each part the text runs as a series of short untitled vignettes, usually two to eight pages, each built around a single episode:

• I. A Woman on the Street — about five pages. Adult Jeannette in a taxi in New York, spotting her mother going through a dumpster, and the lunch that follows.
• II. The Desert — the childhood years of constant movement through Arizona, Nevada and California. Opens with the fire and ends with Rex's failed attempt at sobriety.
• III. Welch — the longest part by far, roughly seven years in the West Virginia coalfields. Erma, the shack on Little Hobart Street, the hunger, and the escape fund.
• IV. New York City — Lori goes first, then Jeannette, then Brian and Maureen. Barnard, journalism, and the parents arriving in a white van to become homeless.
• V. Thanksgiving — a coda of three or four pages, five years after Rex's death.

If a study guide refers you to "chapter 49", that numbering is the guide's invention rather than the book's — SparkNotes, GradeSaver and Novelguide each impose a different scheme to make the memoir teachable.

This The Glass Castle summary begins with the scene that made Walls write the book. She is in a taxi in New York on a cold March evening, on her way to a party, worrying that she is overdressed, when she sees a woman about fifteen feet away digging through a dumpster with a dog at her feet. She recognises her mother by her gestures, slides down in the seat so as not to be seen, and tells the driver to take her home. At lunch a few days later she offers to help. Rose Mary tells her that she is the one who needs help, that her values are confused, and that she should stop lying about where she comes from.

Then the childhood, which opens on a sentence: I was on fire. Jeannette is three, standing on a chair in a trailer in southern Arizona boiling hot dogs for herself, and her dress catches. She spends six weeks in hospital having skin grafted from her thigh onto her ribs, until Rex arrives and carries her out without discharge or payment — checking out Rex Walls-style. Back home she goes straight back to cooking hot dogs unsupervised, and develops a fascination with fire that never really leaves her.

What follows is years of what Rex calls doing the skedaddle: leaving town in the middle of the night, usually a step ahead of bill collectors, with the children told they are outrunning federal agents and each allowed to bring one thing. Las Vegas, where Rex wins at blackjack until the casinos notice his system. A residential hotel in San Francisco that burns down. The gypsum mine at Midland. Blythe, California, where Maureen is born. Battle Mountain, Nevada, where the family sleeps in cardboard boxes in a converted railway depot and Rex teaches Jeannette to swim by throwing her repeatedly into a sulphur spring called the Hot Pot. Then a good stretch in Phoenix, in the house Rose Mary inherits when Grandma Smith dies — a telephone, a washing machine, bicycles at Christmas.

Rex is the reason the book is not a simple indictment. He is a real autodidact, strong in mathematics and physics, and he teaches his children geology and astronomy and how not to be frightened. He designs the Glass Castle, a solar-powered house of glass to be built in the desert, and carries the blueprints everywhere, revising them, making the children check his calculations. One Christmas when there is no money he takes each child into the desert to pick out a star; Jeannette chooses Venus, and he lets her have a planet. He also drinks catastrophically. For her tenth birthday she asks him to stop, and he ties himself to a bed and goes through withdrawal and stays dry for a few months before relapsing worse than before.

Rose Mary is harder to like. She calls herself an excitement addict, and she has options her children do not: a teaching certificate that gets her hired within a week whenever she bothers, and land in Texas she refuses to sell because it is part of her family. She teaches in Battle Mountain and later in Welch, resents every day of it, and asks why she always has to be the one who earns money. During the worst of the hunger Brian finds her under the bedcovers eating a family-sized chocolate bar; she cries, calls herself a sugar addict, and asks to be forgiven the way they forgive their father his drinking.

Welch is where the book stops being an adventure. The family arrives at Rex's mother Erma, and while the parents are away collecting their belongings, Jeannette walks in on Erma groping Brian. She shouts, Lori fights with Erma, and the children are shut in the basement. When Rex gets back he refuses to hear a word of it and tells them off for being poor guests, which is the moment Jeannette starts to wonder what was done to him.

They move to a three-room shack at 93 Little Hobart Street, propped on cinder blocks on a hillside. No indoor plumbing, no heating, electricity usually cut off, and a hole in the ceiling that lets the rain in. When the stairs to the bathroom rot through, Rose Mary buys a yellow bucket. Jeannette and Brian dig an enormous hole in the yard for the foundation of the Glass Castle, and then, because the family cannot pay the rubbish collection fee, Rex tells them to fill it with the household garbage. Watching the foundation of her father's dream fill up with rubbish is the point at which Jeannette stops believing him. She is hungry enough by then to go through the bins in the school bathroom for food other children have thrown out, and to eat it in a stall so nobody sees.

So the sisters make a plan. Jeannette buys a plastic piggy bank, they name it Oz, and everything either of them earns goes into it — the fund that will put Lori on a bus to New York. After about nine months of saving, Jeannette goes to add a couple of dollars from babysitting and finds Oz slashed open on the floor and emptied. Rex plays innocent. They raise the money again anyway, Lori leaves, and Jeannette follows at seventeen, in the middle of high school, on a bus her father drives her to.

New York works. Jeannette interns and then writes for a Brooklyn paper, gets into Barnard, and brings Brian and then Maureen up after her. Then, three years after she left Welch, her parents turn up in a white van announcing they have come to be a family again. They are evicted twice, live in the van until it is towed, and end up homeless, with Rose Mary refusing every offer of help on the grounds that being homeless is an adventure. Eventually they settle contentedly as squatters in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side, fifteen minutes and several worlds away from the Park Avenue flat Jeannette shares with her husband Eric.

Maureen is the one who does not make it. Youngest, born in California, with no memory of the desert years, she never gets a footing — she drops out, moves into the squat with her parents, sleeps all day and deteriorates. When Rose Mary finally tells her to move out and support herself, Maureen stabs her, seriously enough for stitches and an arrest. Bail is refused, the family fall on each other in the courthouse corridor blaming everyone but themselves, and a judge sends her to a hospital upstate for a year. On release she buys a one-way bus ticket to California without telling anyone. Jeannette apologises to her out loud from a window as the bus pulls away. Walls never puts a diagnosis on any of this.

A year later Rex calls Jeannette at work and asks her to come down, and to bring the cheapest vodka she can find. He tells her he is dying, with a story about a blood disease caught from a drug dealer; the truth is that he is fifty-nine, has smoked four packs a day since he was thirteen and is drinking two quarts of liquor a day. They stay up talking. He says they never did build that Glass Castle. She says they had fun planning it. He says those were some damn fine plans. Two weeks later he has a heart attack, and after some hours on life support he dies. The memoir gives his age but not the year; sources outside the book date it to 1994.

The last part is a Thanksgiving five years on. Jeannette has left Eric, married a writer called John, and bought an old farmhouse — the first home she has ever owned. Rose Mary and Lori come up on the train, Brian brings his daughter Veronica, and John's daughter Jessica is there. Maureen is not; Rose Mary mentions she is thinking of visiting. Rose Mary shrieks with delight, runs onto the pool cover and falls in. Looking at the loaded table, Brian and Jeannette silently think the same thing — that feeding a family is not actually that hard — and Lori tells him not to say it out loud.

John proposes a toast to Rex. Rose Mary stares at the ceiling miming thought, then raises her glass: life with your father was never boring. They drink, and Jeannette can almost hear him chuckling. The final sentence brings back the physics lesson he gave her as a child, about the top of a flame being the boundary between turbulence and order: a wind picks up, the windows rattle, and the candle flames shift and dance along that border.

The lines readers return to in The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, quoted verbatim:

"I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes."

"Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars."

"You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty."

"Everyone has something good about them," she said. "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that."

"Being homeless is an adventure."

"A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order."

The second is Rex on the Christmas Eve when there was no money for presents and he gave each child a star instead. The last is the final sentence of the book. Two lines widely attributed to this memoir are worth avoiding: there is nothing in it about a world where "no one had a chance to catch fire", and the much-quoted "one benefit of Dad's drinking" line does not exist — the real sentence is about having more daylight to read by in summer.