If you haven’t read Jeannette Wall’s heartbreaking book
The Glass Castle shame on you.
Get it.
Read it.
Then come back here when you’re ready for a proper discussion.
Don’t worry, I’m only half-kidding. I myself have to do a re-read to acquaint myself with the kids and the family again though if memory serves me right I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with at least one of the parental figures and a little part of my heart wanted badly to forget them quickly after that first read. It’s been a while since I first grabbed it up on the ultra-brilliant suggestion of one of my sisters who makes such regular ultra-brilliant suggestions as though they were gas bubbles.
It was totally worth buying the hard copy.
Jeannette Wall spoke at a local women’s book store tonight (not a big box either, I’m pleased to add) so my girlfriend and I camped out stopped in to hear what JW had to say. She blew in on a fairy dust breeze right exactly on time looking just the right amount of apologetic balanced with a quarter cup of harried and three tablespoons of ‘
Yes of course I’m here, let’s get started shall we?’. Wall is a striking woman, long-legged and slender. She sat with right leg crossed over her left while she was being introduced and the arch of her foot in that killer spike-heeled shoe arched like a dancer’s trained pointe. She is the woman I would have had a preteen crush on if I’d have known a woman who looked and spoke like her when I was a preteen. Well shucks, I did. Mrs. Riley taught 6th grade when I was in what, 4th grade? 5th grade? In the S.O.P. program, at any rate, yes those Special Opportunities for smartiepants years … as far as I was concerned Mrs. Heavenly Smile Riley did not walk she floated. She glowed. She was why lipstick was invented. I had forgotten about Mrs. Riley until tonight.
See what a good memoir can do for a person?
Hunh. It has just occurred to me that I’m not sure what to call this author. ‘Jeannette’ makes me sound a little too stalkeresque, as though we’re *tight* (in my own mind, if nowhere else, like oh, reality). I don’t think I want to characterize my fondness for her writing quite that way. Fine, no ‘Jeannette’. She’s married, so I’m not sure I could properly refer to her as ‘Ms. Wall’. Maybe she’d prefer to be ‘Mrs. John Taylor’ and by my misassumption and ill-fated attempt to free her inner feminist I might be stomping all over a very happy, very tender relationship she has with her husband. Oh dear, this isn’t going well at all. Fine, no ‘Ms. Wall’ either.
How ‘bout I stick with ‘JW’? Short, sweet, direct … good. ‘JW’ it is.
JW read a short section about Christmas (the section about how her parents taught the children that all the other kids were suckered by their parents into believing in Santa Claus and in elves, where their parents set them very straight about the holiday, and when her father takes each of the kids out to the desert to let them pick their gifts, if you’ve read it). She opened it up for Q&A time after the reading.
I forgot to bring my notebook along with me so, trying to think quickly and not particularly quietly, I dumped the four paperbacks I purchased before she’d arrived (
The Best American Poetry 2005 (Paul Muldoon, ed.);
interpreter of maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri);
Maybe Baby (Tenaya Darlington), and
I Just Hope It’s Lethal (Rosenberg & November) so I could use the plain brown paper bag to scribble miscellaneous notes that would brilliantly come to me. Because unless you’re poised for brilliance to strike, it never will; having the scratch pad ready is an important step.
Here are the notes I scratched out, in no particular order:
Q: How do you remember all these things that happened so long ago?
A: The mind glosses over to protect you when that’s necessary. I have memories from when I was the age of three, some of which my husband (brother?) suggested I leave out of the book, said I didn’t need to include everything. (diverted to slightly different topic) I didn’t show my mother the book ahead of time when it was first published (reference to chocolate scene in book) I wasn’t sure how she’d take it but I knew I had to tell it.
Q: It seems that it was when situations became stable that your parents leaned toward chaos, as if they needed that {chaos} more than they desired stability. How does that work for you now?
A: I lean towards stick-in-the-mud stability. I love it, I need it, I crave it.
Q: How were your siblings affected by the book?
A: Older sister didn’t want her to write the book because that time in their lives was so incredibly painful to her that she didn’t want to relive it. Her brother (a cop) was frustrated by their parents and supported JW in her writing and also served as fact verifier. She hadn’t been in contact with her kid sister for many years but only since having been on book tours, etc. she was finally able to reconnect with her, which JW considers a real blessing.
Q: Man in audience asked JW to comment on the distance she kept from her past/pain versus the distance she keeps from it now. He suggested the past was ‘Emotional distance’ and that the current is now a ‘Distance of Wisdom’.
A: JW referred to her father, said he was right when he talked about harnessing demons. “
Taking off armor makes one more vulnerable but it’s also a lot lighter.”
Q: Nearly all child-rearing books indicate that children need stability in order to be successful later in life. How did she get successful after such an unstable life?
A: JW related a story about a very rich friend who invited JW along to an Outward Bound experience. JW hadn’t heard of Outward Bound and the friend explained that it’s a program in which you go out into the wilderness and have to rough it. JW said she thought ‘
I lived that for my first 17 years of life! Dang, rich people have to pay for their hardships?!!’ And she realized how disadvantaged her wealthy friend was for not having some very basic survival skills and abilities because the friend’s mother had handed everything to the friend, how the friend had never had been in a position in which she’d had to figure anything out for herself. JW also related something shared w/her by a psychologist who had been interviewing her, that the worst form of child abuse is overindulgence. JW thought she’d agree with that; physical needs are very important, but emotional needs are bigger and if those can be met then the physical needs generally can take care of themselves.
Q: I can kind-of understand how you’d still feel fondness for your father, but your mother?! It’s hard to see how you could love your mom, especially after you were so deprived.
A: “I never thought of her as a mother.”
“It’s not a matter of forgiving her; it’s a matter of
accepting her. It’s not that I’m a good person; it’s that I’m a pragmatist.” (she also related several incidents in which other women would demonstrate ‘maternal’ behavior toward her – like putting her hair into pigtails or fussing over her – and it would stymie her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have someone doing that all the time because she didn’t have someone doing that all the time. IOW, you don’t miss what you don’t have)
And then the Q&A was cut short when the bookstore owner interrupted to let all know that JW had to go. Like NOW. She was headed to a local television studio and was scheduled to be interviewed by Larry King Live about another (infamous) memoir that is currently in the news. The fantabulous JW was whisked away, but not before I thrust my copy in front of her with a pleading look and a ‘if I stick my pen in your hand would you pleeeaaaaase sign this for me?’ and she did.
I have a little bitty crush. Unsustainable, certainly. Nice while it lasts.
Y’know, just like my old pal JW says, when she finally got brave enough to bare her heart and came out with the truth of her past she was scared that she’d clear out rooms, she was sure she’d lose all her friends and that nobody would ever speak to her again. But she discovered all sorts of people who said ‘You had it worse than me, but this happened to me too’. Strangers became friendly faces and she didn’t have to feel alone with her shame. I think that’s worth something, don’t you?
Once there was a little girl who, after many years, got much older. She looked much older, she really did. Other people told her that she looked much older and she could see it for herself when she looked into her own mirror.
