The Glass Castle is an autobiographical novel about the author, Jeannette Walls, and her impoverished childhood. The book follows the inconceivable events of her life which she re-tells in a detached and unbothered manner. We as the reader begin to understand how dysfunctional her life and family truly were, and how these traumatic events were interpreted through the innocent scope of a child.
The Glass Castle is the journey of Jeannette Walls learning to achieve self-determination after years of neglect and mental abuse from her borderline bipolar mother and alcoholic father. Their unreliability caused her to take ahold of her destiny and break the cycle of poverty and glass ceiling over women in the society of that time.