• Jeannette Walls Mother's Name
• Jeannette Walls Mom
• Jeannette Walls Dad Rex Walls
• Jeannette Walls Mom And Dad
• Jeannette Walls Father
• Jeannette Walls Movie
• Jeanette Walls Moms Name

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of 'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

Maureen Walls The Other One. Maureen is the youngest of the family. We know little about her, because it seems that Jeannette doesn't understand her baby sister. Maureen's the oddball of the family. She has nightmares. She joins a cult. She stabs Mom, gets put in a mental hospital,. 'The Glass Castle' is one such book. A 2005 memoir by Jeannette Walls, 'The Glass Castle', explores an atypically bizarre, poverty-stricken upbringing of Walls and her siblings by their mom and dad, from the '50s to her adulthood. It symbolizes the conflict of dysfunctional parents and its impact on her psyche and that of the other children.

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Who are the members of Jeannette Walls’ family in The Glass Castle? Did Jeannette have close relationships with her family members?

Jeannette Walls Mother's Name

Jeannette Walls’ family in The Glass Castle consists of her parents and siblings. Jeannette and her family moved frequently, and she and her siblings often had to fend for themselves when it came to food and shelter.

Read more about Jeannette Walls’ family in The Glass Castle.

Jeannette Walls

Jeannette and her siblings surmounted great adversity in their lives to become stable professionals. Not only were they always hungry, but they were also always too poor to afford clothes, shoes, and other necessities, like toothpaste, heat, and running water. The children were also victim to many close calls with their safety along the way.

Jeannette Walls’ Family: Parents

The Glass Castle family was a real family named the Walls. In important part of this The Glass Castle family were Jeannette’s parents, Rex and Rose Mary, who were responsible for their lives and safety of the Walls children. Jeannette Walls’ family was chaotic and often dangerous.

Rex

Rex Walls was a smart but unruly patriarch of the The Glass Castle‘s real family. He was a former Air Force pilot and had vast knowledge of science, physics, and engineering. He was known as a man who could fix everything and talk his way out of anything. These traits should have added up to success for Rex and his family, but his inability to settle down and follow the rules added up to the opposite.

During Jeannette’s early childhood, Rex moved the family around the desert like a traveling circus. They’d stop in one small cowpoke town after another, set up a life for a few weeks to months, then pack up and start again somewhere else. Rex said they had to keep moving to stay ahead of the law, which was always on his tail, or wealthy businessmen who wanted to steal his ideas. Rex fancied himself an inventor and always had some scheme or another that was sure to help him strike it rich. In reality, Rex was simply dodging bill collectors.

Striking it rich was Rex’s goal, as was being able to build the Glass Castle for his family, a sprawling home made completely of glass and powered by solar energy. He carried the blueprints everywhere the family went, and Jeannette and her siblings would help him design it.

Rose Mary

Jeannette’s siblings—an older sister, Lori, a younger brother, Brian, and later, a baby sister, Maureen—were often left to their own devices for sustenance. Their mother, Rose Mary, had a lifelong dream of being an artist and spent most of her time painting and what little money she had on art supplies. Rose Mary’s art was her priority, even over feeding her children.

A few months after Jeannette’s wedding, Rose Mary’s brother, Jim, died. Grandma Smith had left the other half of the Texas land to Jim. Rose Mary wanted to make sure the land stayed in the family, so she told Jeannette to ask Eric to help her buy it. Jeannette was happy to help and said she had some money saved up. All she needed was the land value to start the process. Rose Mary was cagey, as she had been their whole lives about the land. But when Jeannette pressed her, she said she needed a million dollars.

Jeannette Walls Mom

Jeannette nearly fell off her seat. She thought about how her uncle’s land was the same size as her mother’s. She asked if Rose Mary’s land was worth the same amount, but Rose Mary said she didn’t know. She’d never had it appraised, but she guessed it was more or less the same.
Jeannette was floored. Her mind raced through all those years without food or heat or water or clothes. She thought about the years her parents had been on the streets and squatting in an abandoned building. Was it really possible that Rose Mary had allowed all of them to live that way while sitting on top of a gold mine?

Jeannette Walls’ Family: Siblings

The other part of The Glass Castle’s real family was Jeannette’s siblings. Jeannette had two sisters and a brother.

Lori

Rose Mary wouldn’t hear of getting glasses for Lori. She thought glasses only made poor eyesight worse and that Lori needed to strengthen her eyes through use. But the school said Lori couldn’t attend without them.

When Lori received her glasses, she looked at the world outside with wonder. She’d never seen leaves on trees, words on billboards, or birds in the distance. She was seeing the world for the first time, and she cried with joy.

Lori became obsessed with her newfound vision. She started painting and drawing everything she saw and decided she wanted to be an artist, too.

Brian

Another member of Jeannette Walls’ family was her brother, Brian. Brian came along a year later. He was born in mid-seizure and couldn’t breathe. Rose Mary said he was likely a “goner,” but Brian lived, and the seizures stopped.

Brian and Jeannette loved exploring. Along with the desert, they explored the town dump. One day, they stumbled onto toxic chemicals in large bins. They took glass jars and filled them with the chemicals, then took them to an abandoned shack. They mixed potions together, but when nothing happened, they decided to see if they could catch on fire.
The next day, they dropped a match into a mixture of different chemicals, and a fire bomb shot up into the air. The shack caught on fire and spread so fast, they became trapped inside. Jeannette kicked a board out and escaped, but Brian was still inside. She ran for help and happened to run into Rex walking back from work. Rex ran to the shack and pulled Brian out.

After moving to New York with Jeannette and Lori, Brian became a police officer in the NYPD. He was the only one to attend Jeannette’s college graduation, and married and later divorced. He had a daughter named Veronica, and lived in Brooklyn. Brian had moved up in the force to sergeant detective running a unit that investigated organized crime.

Maureen

Two months after the move, Lilly Ruth Maureen Walls was born. Two days later, Rex checked Rose Mary and the baby out of the hospital Rex Walls style. Jeannette held the baby on the drive home and promised her new sister she would always look after her.

The addition of Maureen to the family did nothing to change the Walls’ way of life. She was only a few months old when it was time to skedaddle again.

Rex’s time at the house dwindled. He stayed out more and more in the evenings. He was gone so much, Maureen’s first words were practically, “Where’s Daddy?”

Maureen had a hard time finding a place in her family. She was spending so much time with her friends and their families, Jeannette felt like she was becoming removed from her real family. Unlike her siblings, Maureen loved it in Welch. Her friends’ families thought she needed protecting and did their best to save her. They were religious families, and Maureen was frequently baptized. She was even attending pentecostal meetings with snake-handlers.

After another six months, Maureen snapped. Rose Mary told her that she would have to move out and learn to fend for herself. In response, Maureen stabbed her. Maureen was arrested, convicted, and sent to a mental facility Upstate. A year later, she was released and bought a ticket to California. She wouldn’t allow anyone to see her off, so the morning of her departure, Jeannette woke early and whispered to the air, “I’m sorry, Maureen.” She’d let her sister down. Jeannette Walls’ family had suffered, especially with losing Maureen.

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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best summary of Jeannette Walls's 'The Glass Castle' at Shortform.

Here's what you'll find in our full The Glass Castle summary:

• The author's unbelievable childhood as her absent parents went on alcoholic binges
• How Jeannette and her siblings escaped their parents to strike out on their own
• The complicated relationship Jeannette had with her parents before they died

Why memoirists don't always have the last word

Anyone who writes a memoir is asking to be called a liar. Folks in Limerick, Ireland, claimed that Frank McCourt made up whole sections of Angela's Ashes. Sean Wilsey's stepmother sent a letter to the publisher of Oh, the Glory of It All claiming that the book contained more than 30 'actionably defamatory statements of fact.' And last month, Augusten Burroughs was sued by members of his adoptive family, who charged that in his bestselling memoir Running with Scissors, he had 'fabricated events that never happened and manufactured conversations that never occurred.'

While there hasn't been any threat of litigation over The Glass Castle, my memoir of growing up with willfully eccentric parents, I can certainly relate to those writers' experiences. Everyone who has read my book seems to have an opinion about it. 'Walls's book is very troubling to thoughtful readers and to anyone who has suffered the childhood she purports to have had,' one woman wrote on Amazon. She went on to say, 'I am angry at a memoir that seems to me deceitful, but I find myself wishing every word were true.'

The charge that I exaggerated the facts of my life has left me perplexed, infuriated and even a bit amused. Having spent years hiding my past, I sat down to write about it after my mother dared me to 'tell the truth.' So far, no one I know, and certainly no one in my family, has challenged my account.

Jeannette Walls Dad Rex Walls

Even so, aspects of my childhood are so bizarre that people simply find them hard to fathom. I got some clue of what was to come when a lawyer for my publisher vetted my manuscript. 'You are alleging child neglect,' she said at one point. Not really, I shrugged. It was just the way I was raised. The events that she found most horrifying seemed pretty unexceptional to me. 'Some people who've lived very normal lives refuse to believe those of us who haven't,' Augusten Burroughs told me this past summer.

Jeannette Walls Mom And Dad

Then there's the question of the reliability of memory. People have asked me how I can recall something that happened to me when I was three years old. My answer is: How could I possibly forget being burned so badly that I was in the hospital for six weeks and had to have skin grafts?

The most important goal of a memoir writer is to tell the truth. But truth is subjective, especially when one is condensing decades into several hundred pages. My brother, my sisters and my mother have all said that while they felt my book was substantially true, any memoir they would have written would have been entirely different.

Jeannette Walls Father

One of my most cherished memories was of Christmas when I was five. My parents had no money for presents, but Dad took each of us children out into the desert night and gave us any star we wanted. My brother—who is a year younger and has a steel-trap memory for most things—didn't recall the incident at all. My older sister saw it as yet another example of Dad conning us into thinking our hardships were in fact a great adventure. 'That's just like that s.o.b.,' she said. 'Giving away something he didn't own in the first place.'

Jeannette Walls Movie

Sometimes, people aren't upset by what you think will set them off. I struggled over whether or not to include a scene where we kids had gone without food for days and my brother caught Mom secretly chomping away on a giant chocolate bar. I thought it was pretty damning, but said something significant about our family, so I left it in. My mom never mentioned it. She was, however, quite indignant about my description of her atrocious driving. 'Your father always used to make fun of my driving, and this is just like you to side with him on that,' she said.

All in all, though, my mom said she was fine with the book. 'There are certain things that I saw differently than you,' she told me. 'But then I realized, 'That's how it must have looked to a little girl.' You had to tell the truth as you saw it.'

Jeanette Walls Moms Name

Jeannette Walls is the author of the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, which will be out in paperback from Scribner in January.