TOW #1 - The Glass Castle

In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author shares the effects of growing up with struggling parents. In the beginning of this book, the author is a young three-year-old girl who views her parents as inspirational and caring, even after going to the hospital for burns that were caused by cooking hot dogs while being left alone. When brought to the hospital, the nurses knew she was living with a dangerous family but Walls still looked up to her parents and their life together. After leaving the hospital, Walls’s family started moving to many different places in the United States. Walls’s father would say he was trying to move his family to a safer place but Walls’s mother would say it was because they could not afford the bills that were going after the family. Walls’s father would always tell her family all of “the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle” (Walls 25). In the beginning of this memoir, Walls’s describes her father as a dreamer. He moves the family around in very poor, inferior locations as he searches for “gold” so he can build his family the perfect house.  Jeannette Walls is a journalist for many successful magazines such as USA Today, and a New York Times Bestseller for this memoir, The Glass Castle. Jeannette Walls wrote this memoir to express to her audience that it is possible to overcome difficult times. In Walls’s childhood she faced many obstacles but she overcame them to experience a better life. Walls’s audience is to any person that faced a difficult childhood. Walls experienced the challenge of a difficult childhood and she wanted to be able to share how she overcame that difficult time to her audience. Walls includes many rhetorical devices in her memoir such as similes, personification and imagery. In the part of this book that I read, I believe that Walls’s achieved her purpose for writing this book because she descriptively shares her story of her past to help any person that may going through difficult times with family.

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle: A Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2005. Print.