Essay On Jeannette Walls

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CHAOS TO CAREER “I was on fire” (9). As strange as it seems, this is how Jeannette Walls began the story of her childhood, and a fire it was indeed. The Glass Castle is a riveting memoir that tells of Jeannette Walls’ unpredictable childhood. Her parents, or rather lack of true parents, pushed Jeannette to become the woman she is today. Years of poverty and moving gave her the drive to make her future the opposite of the life she had lived as a child. Jeannette became the woman she is today in spite of her childhood because of the poverty she faced, the lack of a consistent and reliable home, and the two, polar opposite sides of her father. For the first seventeen years of her life, Jeannette lived in a kind of poverty that most people could hardly imagine: no plumbing, dangerous infrastructure in her houses, and rarely any food. Her family was so poor that “[the] kids slept in big cardboard boxes” (52), says Jeannette.. This largely contrasts to the life she lived even when she first arrived in New York. In New York, Jeannette worked …show more content…
While this is did shape some sort of responsibility factor in her, the damage it did far outweighed the good. Jeannette says on page 209, “...and Dad wasn’t even doing me the honor of pretending he needed the money for something useful...He simply waited for me to fork over the cash, as if he knew I didn’t have it in me to say no. And I didn’t.” Having to be her and her siblings’ own parental figures had caused Jeannette to be incapable of saying no to her father even when she knew it would cost them a week’s worth of food. Since she was in charge of the money, and her father constantly made her loan his money, her relationship with Rex had a large downfall. She lost almost all her trust and faith in her father and it permanently damaged her coping

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