The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls earliest childhood memory shared within her book, The Glass Castle: A Memoir, is of her getting taken to the hospital after getting caught on fire while cooking hot dogs for herself as a three year old. According to the doctors she was “lucky to be alive” (Walls 9), and was left with a permanent scar from a skin graft. Living in a trailer in Southern Arizona with two siblings, Lori and Brian, and her Mom and Dad, Jeannette was considered, “mature for [her] age” (Walls 9), making meals and entertaining herself. Her father, Rex Walls, broke her out of the hospital without paying the bill and brought her home after a few days, where life resumed as normal, and Jeannette remained unshaken by fire, having already, “fought the fire once and won” (Walls 14). A few months later the family would have to leave their home and get on the road because there were people after them, mostly debt collectors, and from then on they moved around, living for a while in a multitude of small towns in Arizona, California, and Nevada, and every once in awhile staying with her mother's Grandmother, and for the most part their parents being the children's educators.
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Accordingly, she worked to construct herself braces, knowing her parents would not be able to afford them, and she reworked her creation multiple times into a way that worked for her, “those braces [being] a goddamn feat of engineering genius" (Walls 204), as Rex saw them. Then as a seventh grader, she made the decision that she would leave Welch as soon as possible, and shared this plan with Lori and Brian, deciding New York would be the best bet at starting a new life. When Jeannette was given a summer-long babysitting opportunity by her neighbors, she turned the job over to Lori, the payment at the end of the summer being a bus ticket to New