The Glass Castle – Book Discussion

I finished the book last night. I still just cannot believe that people live/lived this way. I could not believe at the end that the mother was actually a millionaire, and chose to live this way. but what is truely disturbing to me is that while she chose to live that way, her kids starved and and almost died (while she got fat and ate chocolate bars). The lifestyle for them was a choice, not due to circumstances. I cannot beleive that she refused to work, while her kids starved. I also cannot beleive that she stayed with the father, and how wise Jeanette was as a daughter. Telling her if she did not leave dad he was going to bring them all down with him (how smart she is). The father actually reminds me alot of my dad. This pity, feel so bad for him, out there kinda likable guy. However I was not the favorite.

Funny thing was my mother had read the book as well. She did not seem so taken back by how they lived, because in all actuality we did not live much better as kids. While my parents often had bright shiny cars, clothes, horses, we lived in a kinda old crappy house (alhtough large) that they spent tons of money fixing up; but dad and her got braces when i should have got braces (still never have), and they had the cars; but we had only two to three pairs of pants on a good year and did not ever really get new clothes, and saw pictures where our animals now looking back almost appeared to be starving. My mother saw it as a the book portrayed it as a nomadic lifestyle, flower child age. I view it as abuse and neglect, life with a ragging/never harldy ever sober alchoholic, and a mother who never really embrassed her life and reality and quite frankly appears a little crazy. Not to lay it all on her, but she appeard to be the most capable in the relationship, and she should have left. JEanette was abused sexually so many times, but yet the mother nor father never interferred, and actually encouraged it.

I kept waiting for one of the kids to die or be murdured. I am amazed they survived childhood.

Funny too is how often phsychologists say we repeat our past, co-dependents. But she did not. She married twice and from what she wrote, it does not appear that either of her husbands were alchoholics.