Journal Entry #1 "The Glass Castle"

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls in as extremely powerful book. It makes you see the world in such a different way that you can't believe that this is a true story. At the start of the book the father throws out Quixote, their house cat, out the window of the moving vehicle. He explains to the children that crying will not help because Quixote would be happier as a wild cat. Later in the novel though they have another house cat and she has kittens, the father thinks that it is is alright to drown the kittens. Dealing with your father drowning your kittens, I don't know how Jeanette could deal with that when she is only seven years old. Why could they have not been wild cats? What would have been the problem with that?

Another thing that struck me was the parents think that it is okay that the kids are hungry and have nothing to eat. "It was the only thing to eat in the whole house, and I was hungry" PG 69. Jeannette gets ridiculed for eating a stick of butter with her sister, Lori. She lets her mother know that her children are hungry. The mother throw a massive fit and yells and the father when he gets home. They end up fighting for days and days on end. I've heard my parents fight and I hate it. It's the most pointless thing. The mother is so opposed to food stamps or hand outs though that she doesn't care that her children are staving. The mother thinks that a little hardship will do you good. My parents believe that too, and they have instilled that into me as well. But not for food, for working hard to get a job done, yes. It's okay for the hardship to be put in for things like that. But for your body to be starving and you not feeding it. You need food to survive you can't live without it. I don't think that the mother realizes it.

Also the father keeps spending all the family's money. He keeps Jeannette believing that he will build her the most amazing house, "The Glass Castle". But she is starting to lose faith in her father. She doesn't understand why he is gone most of the days and only comes home once and a while. He spends all the money they could be using to build a "glass castle" on booze. And when he is drunk he gets into the drunken rages and has pointless actions. "Rose Mary, where the goddamn hell are you, you stinking bitch?" He yells, "Where is that whore hiding?"PG 122 after he comes home in a drunken rage one night. They than pick up knifes and almost have a fight with them but Rex, the father, knocks the knife out of Rose Mary', the mothers hand. Having to see that as a young child is a terrible experience, your parents constant fighting and their terrible words being thrown back at one another. But yet at the end of the days the parents are holding each other, laughing, loving, and dancing with one another. I think that fighting among people is fine, you don't have to get that terrible though. I couldn't even fathom having to witness that as a young child.

The book "The Glass Castle" is an extremely in depth book and is fascinating. It tells the life story of the hardship that Jeannette Walls had to go threw and how she dealt with things. She is had what I think was a terrible life so far, but she has made a life for herself, on her own. And she is doing an amazing job at it.