The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls had a hard life growing up with her two sisters, older Lori, and younger Maureen and one younger brother, Brian. Her father was an alcoholic who didn't hold down a job for long and her mother was an artist who rarely sold a piece of art, but held a degree in teaching that she only used twice in Walls life to help support the family when they were starving and had to be forced into it while the kids did the actual grading of her students' work.  When her dad drank the hard stuff he would become violent and trash the place and once got into a knife fight with her mother. Though no one got hurt, it was scary to watch.

Her earliest memory is at the age of three cooking hotdogs over a gas stove and her dress catching fire and burning her and her not knowing what to do when her mother, Mary, arrived in the room and saw what was going on and fetched a blanket and put out the fire on her daughter's body with a blanket and taking her to the neighbor's house to get a ride to the hospital. She would receive skin grafts from her thigh to her side where she had been burned about the size of a hand.  After six weeks her dad, Rex, decided she had been in the hospital enough and broke her out by sneaking her out. She immediately went back to cooking hot dogs over the stove and for a while became fascinated with fire.  Soon, though they had to pick up stakes and leave because there was no food and they owed money.

They would move around California for a long while, stopping for a bit of a stay in Las Vegas before going to Arizona to stay in her mother's newly inherited home.  With the money she had gotten from her mother after her death, she had enough to really make a go of her art career and a place to do it at.  Her dad even got a good job as an electrician and they were able to afford nice things like a bicycle for everyone on top of food every night and electricity and for the first time, a phone.  Things went well for a while. They did well in school. And then their father lost his job and got fired from his second and third.  Soon he was down to doing odd jobs here and there.  They had run through the money Mary had gotten from her inheritance and now they were back to an empty refrigerator. Mary shoplifted clothes for Maureen to wear to kindergarten since all she had to wear were threadbare hand-me-downs.

But soon, Mary would get it in her head that they would need to go stay with Rex's family in Welch, West Virginia even though Rex was vehemently against this.  His family is likely part of the reason why he drank.  Erma Walls was a hard, bitter woman who couldn't cook and was a racist who hated them on sight.  Grandpa Wells was ok, and Uncle Stanley was another alcoholic who would prove to be a pervert.  Life was hard in Welch. They were treated as the outsiders they were and were beat up regularly by one group or another.  They were forced to move out of Erma's house and Rex found them a three-room shack way up in the hills with no indoor plumbing and no refrigerator.  They had electricity when they could afford it.  They had a stove that when they could afford it they put coal in it to heat the house, but when they couldn't they used wood, which wasn't nearly as effective. The roof had holes in it that let in rain. 

The kids would eat food from the trash can at school and sometimes that would be the only food they'd eat that day.  Her thin winter coat had no buttons and she would color her skin beneath the holes in her pants to cover the holes since she couldn't do patches so her skin was polka dotted in various colors.  She found a two-carat ring in the woods but her mother refused to sell it instead deciding that it would replace her engagement ring that Rex had sold off years ago. Her kids are starving and she feels that she needs an adornment pick-me-up for her self-esteem rather than feed them.

Her mother didn't believe in rules but in letting one express oneself creatively and would get in trouble with the school she worked at for these ideas.  Every few months or so Mary would receive a check for some property she owned in Texas that she had inherited that was being drilled on that would help them out.  But once Rex would get to the check first and drink it away.  He was working on a design for a Glass Castle where they would all live in that would be heated by solar panels and each kid would have their own room.  He would start building on it when one of his inventions or his bright ideas came through and made them a lot of money.   The kids often found themselves taking care of the adults in these relationships and let me tell you they frankly got sick of it eventually no matter how much they loved their parents.  Wells is an amazing writer. You can hardly believe that this is factual. It's so difficult to believe, but the truth often is.  The book is short and you can complete it pretty quickly but you are left feeling as though you have come on a long journey with a girl who grows into an incredible young woman and is satisfied by the completion of this journey.  This is truly a remarkable book and I highly recommend it. 

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Castle-Memoir-Jeannette-Walls-ebook/dp/B000OVLKMM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536150149&sr=8-1&keywords=the+glass+castle+by+jeannette+walls