The parents have a steady income, and the children find their life is somewhat normal.īut it doesn't last.
Rex holds down a job as an electrician, becoming an active member of the electricians' union and keeping his "drinking situation," as Rose Mary calls it, under control. Her mother sets up an art studio and gallery, and in spite of weeks spent creating her "art reference library," she does several paintings. Phoenix is where Jeannette remembers her life having some stability. When it's uncovered that Rose Mary's wealthy, disapproving mother has died, the family heads to Phoenix to claim the house Rose Mary inherits. Rather, she is self-consciously quick to reveal the embarrassment and shame she feels about them. Jeanette never tries to hide how she negatively judges her parents. Even so, the skedaddle becomes more complicated and consequential with four kids in tow, a lesson the parents learn but refuse to accept. It's about freedom and anti-capitalism and not letting the Man get you down. It is not staying in one place for too long, avoiding boredom and embracing art, music, chance and luck. Apart from the genre itself, The Glass Castle also retains parallels with Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel, On the Road, another book whose characters wander across America, looking for their big break and struggling to find it.The skedaddle, for parents Rose Mary and Rex Walls, is adventure and excitement. Indeed, some critics have complained about the preponderance of “misery memoirs” that recount a painful childhood and the author’s attempts to overcome it-though others have praised the honesty and transparency of the genre. The Glass Castle also recalls Mary Karr’s 1995 The Liars’ Club, which concerns yet another difficult childhood beset by abusive, alcoholic relatives. Like Styron, Walls was already well-known when she wrote The Glass Castle like McCourt, she was not yet known as a writer, and catapulted to fame with the memoir’s publication. Critics argue about when the precipitous rise in memoir writing began-some have pegged it on William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his 1990 book about struggling with depression, or on Frank McCourt’s 1996 Angela’s Ashes, about growing up impoverished with an alcoholic father in Ireland and New York.
“This is the age of the memoir,” William Zinsser wrote in his 1998 book on the genre.
0 kommentar(er)
