Thankful for Differences
Even as a full-grown adult, the author of The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls, still stands out as being different. Jeannette grew up in abnormal circumstances that some might consider neglectful or abusive. From her point of view, her upbringing was just her normal. Today, Walls is a successful author and public speaker. With her wacky stories, hearty life, and positive outlook, she is a likable character that has been formed and molded by her life experiences. Something that Jeannette and her family has dealt with throughout their life is appearing different than others around them. Being different, from looks to character, was a theme that proliferated Jeannette Walls’ book, The Glass Castle, just as being different
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Also, the length and width of the cleft affects the impact on certain aspects of life and development of a child. These aspects that cleft lip and palate affect include breathing, hearing, and speaking, along with physical appearance and dental issues. With all that said, my cleft lip and palate was very wide. It has required numerous surgeries to repair it and improve my cosmetic appearance. Fortunately, I have been blessed with team of doctors from Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, …show more content…
One year while I was at church camp, I remember being made fun of during worship. All of the kids who were attending the camp were sitting around a campfire. Our pastor for the week asked everyone to share one thing they were thankful for. There was a group of boys who had not been very kind to me were snickering as kids noted what they were thankful for. When it came time for boys in the group, the first one confidently said, “I am thankful that I look normal.” He was staring at me over the campfire. The second boy remarked, “I am thankful I don’t have scars on my
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities. This is evident in Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, which reiterates the story of Jeannette who is raised within a family that is both deeply dysfunctional and distinctively vibrant. Jeannette is faced with numerous barriers throughout her life. Despite the many obstacles set forth by her parents during her childhood, Jeannette develops into a successful adult later in life. One of these obstacles is the lack of a stable home base moulds her into the woman she grows up to be. Throughout her life, Jeannette must cope with the carelessness of her
“The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls is an extremely captivating novel that really kept my attention throughout the entire story. It’s a fascinating story of growing up in circumstances that kept me shaking my head as I turned the pages. The Walls family is unquestionably one unlike any I’ve ever come across. The lessons and experiences that the children learned and endured were ones that molded their lives and established who they are today. Jeanette Walls goes through many descriptions of situations that she faced that people normally should not face. For most of her childhood, her family traveled from town to town because her parents always thought that they would hit it big, unfortunately her father was never ever to find a
Author Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle, revisits her childhood memories and relationships with her family. Walls’ purpose is to persuade people that you’re past doesn’t define who you are. To achieve her purpose, she uses a conversational tone with imagery, contrasting syntax, and anaphora in order to inspire readers to overcome their own problems.
Jeannette is talking about her entire family. The Walls’ family had been through a lot at the point in Jeannette’s life where they get stuck in the desert. The passage signifies the Wall’s will to continue and not give up. Not one member of the Walls family is uneducated. Rex lives the life he wants to live, although it isn’t a very good life, and it makes him happy. If Rex is happy there is nothing to be bitter about. Jeannette uses Buster to represent her family on a smaller scale; wounded, angry, and broken down. The Walls family can be angry at time but they are not bitter. Fights between Rex and Mary happen all the time but grudges are forgotten a minute or two after the event. Anger is an on going theme throughout Jeannette’s life
Jeannette Walls begins her memoir with an encounter with her mother, a homeless woman digging through garbage. Walls is “overcome with panic that she’d see [her] and call our [her] name… that [her] secret would be out” (Walls 3). This gives Walls the opportunity to answer the question she has created in the reader’s mind; how did this happen? Walls answers this with a recollection of her, to say the least, unique childhood. In writing The Glass Castle, Walls is forced to reflect on her life and family and realize how both have affected her as an individual; quotes of her mother are filled with litotes, descriptions and interactions with her father are surrounded with motifs of “being tough”, and the effects of being raised by these two characters
American writer and journalist, Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle(2005), narrates her personal history. She tells the good, bad, and ugly of her childhood. Walls’ purpose is to encourage her readers that anyone can overcome adversity and be great. She kept her positivity and humor even in the roughest of times and kept her family together even through all their movement from place to place. Walls’ pushed herself through her challenges and hardships to become prosperous and happy.
In Jeannette Walls’s memoir, she describes how her father, Rex, wants to build a glass castle for him and his family to live in. In the book, she writes, “...All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert” (Walls 25). Rex wanted to make this happen for his family but unfortunately, his plans weren’t so realistic. So if I could build a glass castle the location of my glass castle would be in Atlanta, GA. I chose this location because I have family down there and I always travel down south every year. I chose to have 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a kitchen, an attic, a living room, a dining room, patio, and a basement. I chose to have these things because if I’m going to have a dream
This summer I read the memoir “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls. This is the first book that I have read of hers, although I would be interested in reading one of her other books such as “The Silver Star” or “Half Broke Horses”. The memoir takes place in many different cities and states. The novel starts out in New York City when the author is an adult and married, but then it flashes all the way back to when Jeannette, the main character, was three and living in southern Arizona. Jeannette was home alone and she was making herself food when she caught on fire and was taken to the hospital. After six weeks of being in the hospital, her dad, Rex Walls, decided that the nurses and doctors were not trustworthy and was uncomfortable with hospitals, so he snuck her out without being discharged. Soon after, the family “did the skedaddle” as Jeannette called it, and moved to Las Vegas. On the way to their destination, at night, the kids asked their dad to tell them a bedtime story. He told them mostly stories about himself and in the stories he was always the hero. In this particular story, however, the author’s dad describes the plans that he has for the future. This plan consisted of building the Glass Castle, which he has been planning for a very long time. The castle would be a large house for the whole family in the middle of the desert and it would have a glass ceiling, thick glass walls, and a glass staircase. For electricity, there would be solar cells on the
In the works The Glass Castle, a memoir written by Jeanette Walls; it is profoundly evident that young Jeanette lived through an abnormal childhood. Parents Rex and Rosemary Walls psychological self-hatred and selfishness, has created a false illusion of a healthy childhood for their daughter Jeanette Walls. As they manifest detrimental influences through her childhood, Jeanette takes control, resulting in an adult who perceivers through harsh obstacles; coming out stronger in the end. Although her entire surroundings and lifestyle seem to be a toxic catastrophe as a child, the most notable examples of harmful conditions are her father’s uncontrollable drunkenness and desire to steal from his children, her mother’s greed and disregard towards
Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.
“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is a memoir of a family that is frequently homeless and living in very poor conditions. Despite all this, the protagonist Jeannette Walls does not lose faith but, but does the exact opposite. She does everything in her power to earn money and get an education so she can escape her current life and move to a place with better opportunities, which is New York (Walls 2005) This book intrigued me because of the way Walls tells her story. She does not have a trouble-free life, but she is a brave woman for telling her story to others. Walls admitted in her interview with Oprah as well as in her book, that she is so embarrassed of her parents in the streets. While she lives in her warm and comfortable home, her parents are in the street looking through garbage cans for food. Jeannette Walls’s approach to life is astounding, and the way she tells her story with such emotion but at the same time some parts are relatable to many others. Walls uses many rhetorical techniques in her writing that absorbs the reader not only to enjoy her book but also to empathize for her.
Usually in society parents are to be blamed for failing to raise their children in the right way. It is very easy for the society to criticize parents when they mistreat their child or not take care of his/her needs and wants. It is easy for a parent to get judged in society comparing to a child because parents are role models for children’s. Even when a child has been mistreated by her/his parent, it is easy for the child to forgive their parents. The reason behind that situation would be a parent’s unconditional love that a child sees, despite what he/she has been through. In the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she portraits a situation like that where the character spends her childhood memories with her father. Even though Jeannette’s father Rex Walls was an irresponsible father and failed to protect his children, Jeannette still loved her father dearly.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a descriptive and emotion filled memoir of her childhood and how it affected her in her adulthood. The novel was released in 2005 and in 2017 the film version was released. The purpose of both the novel and film was not only to inform the reader about Jeannette’s story, but to also encourage people to achieve their dreams and to not let their past determine their future. In comparison to the movie, the book portrays the theme, characters and the mood of events better. Although both the novel and film allows the audience to get a sense of the central purpose, the book has a way of making the reader emotionally attached and want to continue reading.
Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.
Through my years of having a cleft, I have realized many important things: Normality is not defined by society, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but most importantly I learned that I had to change my mind about myself. In my mind, I was deformed and not normal. There were times I wish I could go to bed and wake up being normal. One day when I was in the town, I was about eight years old and I saw a young man I believed to be fifteen years old and he too had cleft lip and palate. I stared at him for a few seconds, not because we had the same birth defect, but because of how obvious it