1. Glass Castle Movie
2. The Glass Castle Book Review
3. The Glass Castle Goodreads
4. The Glass Castle Goodreads Book

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.

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With The Glass Castle hanging out on the New York Times bestseller list for 261 weeks —that's over five years, folks—Walls wrote Half-Broke Horses (2009), a 'true-life novel' about her maternal grandmother, and The Silver Star (2013), a novel about another dysfunctional family, this one entirely fictional. Get the entire The Glass Castle LitChart as a printable PDF. 'My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof.' The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Walls, Jeannette 1st (first) edition Paperback(2006) Paperback – January 1, 2005 by -Author- (Author) 4.6 out of 5 stars 5,847 ratings. Actors Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, and director Destin Daniel Cretton discuss the advantages of their working relationship with the author of. Her father, Rex, dreams of building a glass castle: a palace of windows, with a crystalline staircase and electricity-producing solar cells. Instead, the family hovers between their jalopy and a series of dilapidated homes because Rex would rather keep a bottle of whiskey than a job.

Is there sexual abuse in The Glass Castle? Did Jeannette Walls and her siblings experience sexual abuse?

There are several examples of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle. Both Jeannette Walls and her brother Brian experienced sexual abuse from their adult family members.

Read more about the examples of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle, and how Jeannette and her siblings survived.

Evils of the Past: Sexual Abuse in The Glass Castle

There are several instances of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle, and examples of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle occur to Jeannette and to her brother, Brian. On a cold winter’s morning, Rex and Rose Mary drove away from Erma’s house and headed back to Phoenix. They wanted to pick up the rest of their stuff and get the children’s school records. Jeannette could tell both her parents were excited to be leaving.

Jeannette wondered if her parents would come back. Now that the children were older, she feared they’d become too big a burden. A week past and her parents were still gone. Erma was more critical and mean without Rex around and hit the kids with a wooden spoon. One day, she called Brian into her room to mend his pants. She’d been drinking all morning from a bottle she kept in her housecoat. After a minute, Jeannette heard Brian squirming and whining. She ran to the room and saw Brian crying and Erma on her knees molesting his privates. This is one of the disturbing instances of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle.

Jeannette screamed for her to stop, and Lori came running in. Erma scolded Jeannette and reached back to slap her, but Lori stopped her arm and tried to calm things down. After Erma slapped Lori, the two got into a fist fight, and Lori punched Erma in the face.

After that, the children weren’t allowed to come out of the basement. They weren’t allowed to use the bathroom upstairs, so they had to go at school or outside. When a snowstorm hit, Erma wouldn’t give them coal for the basement stove. Whenever they weren’t at school, all four kids piled under the covers in their clothes and coats to stay warm.

When Rex and Rose Mary returned, Erma told them what had happened. Rex stomped down the stairs and went into a tirade about disrespecting their grandmother. He said Brian should stop being such a sissy. The children wondered if Erma had ever done something like that to Rex. None of them wanted to think about it, but they all agreed it would explain a lot.

The Downward Spiral Continues

At the end of their second winter in Welch, Erma died of cirrhosis. Rex slipped into a deeper state of despair and stayed out even longer than before. After four or so days, Rose Mary would send Jeannette to find him.

Jeannette went from one bar to the next until she found him. One time, Rex was in the seediest bar in town and too drunk to function. The other patrons helped throw in him the back of some man’s truck, and he drove Jeannette and Rex back home.

Shortly after Erma’s death, Uncle Stanley burned their house down after falling asleep with a cigarette. He and his father moved to a small apartment in town. The apartment had indoor plumbing, and the children would bathe there on weekends.

Jeannette was waiting for her turn in the bath one afternoon while watching television with Stanley. His hand started to move up her thigh, and she saw that he was masturbating. Rose Mary was in the other room. When Jeannette ran to tell her what was happening, Rose Mary said it was sad how lonely Stanley was, and besides, sexual assault is all about perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. Jeannette stopped going to the apartment to bathe. Even though this was a case of sexual abuse in The Glass Castle, Jeannette’s mother didn’t acknowledge it or try to help her.

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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

Sometimes what we experience in our past shapes us to what we are today. Some of these things can be pure and joyous, while others are tragic and horrific. For “The Glass Castle” Jeanette Walls, it is a bit of both, as she had to live a nomadic life with her family constantly on the move, her father and mother unable to provide a sense of stability, but always came through for her in some other way. Now her life story his hitting the big screen in a film adaptation of the same name from “Short Term 12” director Destin Cretton and Academy Award winner Brie Larson.

The film covers Walls life story as it jumps to and from her past to the present, weaving in the good and the bad. All of it would help her navigate through the perils of life and discover that home is wherever she goes.

We had a chance to sit down and talk with Walls about that life and what it means to share that story with the world.

You have such a deeply profound personal story and you decided to share that with the world. How did you come to that decision?

Jeanette Walls: It’s pretty huge, isn’t it? Well I think the people were so smart about the book. I did not think people would get the book. I was pretty much hogtied to the desk by my husband who said “you must tell this story.” I was just tired of hiding, and I didn’t think anybody would get it. If people got the book as well as they have, I just needed to trust they would get the movie as well. I expected it to be met with contempt and ridicule, and instead these magical things started to happen: these people started to share their stories with me. They trust me, they say “I think you’ll understand.” I think people need to hear stories like this to understand that – first of all “who are these crazy homeless people and why don’t they take care of their own children” but also if they have issues with their own family to understand that “I am not alone. There are people out there with a similar situation, even weirder, and I do not need to be a shamed of this and if I want to change it I can, but I want to accept it than I can too.” So in a way it’s not even about me. In a way it’s gotten even bigger than that. But to me it’s more about storytelling, and the power of coming clean, and saying “this is who I am honey, take it or leave it, and if you don’t want it too bad I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. If you want to embrace it, that’s lovely. If you don’t want to embrace it, that’s fine too.”

So if someone wanted to share their story as well but don’t know how to go about it, what is the first thing you would tell them to do?

JW: I think the first thing I would tell them is to trust themselves. I think that people are our toughest critics. I think that some people think that they aren’t as good as other people or that they’ve got to hide something. A very wise artist once said to me said most people want to be more than who they are. But art is finding out the true essence of who they are, and that was one of the many lessons I hope I have learned. I was so ashamed of my past for so long, I thought that nobody would get it. Once I was ready to come clean about it, it was the best thing I had going for me. I had this past I was ashamed of that is now a movie that I am proud of. How ironic is that. All this time it was my ace up the sleeve and I was pretending it didn’t exist. I had this job, and it was a good job, I was on television discussing celebrities and getting a fat salary for it, and I thought it couldn’t get any better than that. But it felt wrong, and I finally come clean about this story, and that was the story that people wanted to hear. They didn’t want to hear about this crap that I was reporting on, it was this story. That’s one of my messages to people: shine those lights in those dark corners. Dark corners are where you find the treasures, and I am kind of on a mission to think a little bit about their stories. They don’t have to necessarily share it with the world if they are not ready to, but trust yourself. Trust your story. Trust humanity for the most part. There are jerks out there, of course, but my story is a little bit of a jerk detector. If you don’t like it, get out of my life.

Brie Larson and Author Jeannette Walls on the set of THE GLASS CASTLE. Photo by Jake Giles Netter.

I was reading a couple of your interviews in the past and your book has been optioned to be turned into a movie since 2005, what is it like to wait that long and to see it finally hit the big screen?

JW: It was 12 years ago. It got optioned for a movie pretty much when it came out. I was even in a shoot with Elle Magazine with five other authors’ whose books have been optioned for a movie. They all got made into movies, and mine didn’t, and I was like “okay, I can accept this. It’s not going to be made into a movie.” It took forever, but you know what, maybe it needed to find the right director. Maybe we needed to wait for Ella Anderson became old enough to play the ten-year-old me. She was born the exact month the book was publish. It was fate. She was perfect. I don’t know what kept it from being made. But five years ago, this amazing producer named Gil Netter, who also made Life of Pi and Blind Side. He got his hands on it and he’s an amazing man and he just got it made, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He then hired Destin Cretton to direct it, which was the best thing to happen to it. Have you seen Short Term 12?

Yes! I loved it!

Glass Castle Movie

JW: It’s the second best movie ever made. It’s such a good movie. So I felt like if he can bring that level of complexity and compassion to my story, because Short Term 12 is so great because it understood these damaged outcasts have so much love and strength, and they bond together. It’s not my story, but there is so much in common, and he brought that same love, compassion, and insight to my story.

So the fact that it took 12 years because the book had its own love. Nobody can accuse the book of succeeding because of the movie. It did okay on its own. Now it can live a new life.

Speaking of the movie, did you have any input on its portrayal of you and your family?

JW: I don’t even know if I had any contractual input. From the beginning Gil contacted me, he said “I want you to have input on this. I want you to be a part of this.” I don’t know if legally if I had veto power, but I didn’t need it, because anytime they were making any decision that got away from the book or got deeper than the book, they talked to me about it. They said “we’re doing this. How does this feel? We’re thinking about fleshing out this character. The character of David was much more fleshed out in the movie than he was in the book. But Destin did that all in consultation with me. So I don’t think I had any sort of writing credit, I didn’t even want any, it was a very collaborative effort. That’s actually an overstatement, I didn’t collaborate, they just consulted with me and talked to me. But not just him, the set people who asked “we’re working on the apartment on Park Ave., could you give me a description?” They were amazing. When I went to the set, they had this entire wall for each of the sets, “here are the photographs of the Park Ave. apartment.” You know they would work on it. The passion to get it right was mind blowing.

What was your first reaction to when the cast went off script?

JW: Well, it was beautiful because when I was watching it one time, Woody [Harrelson] and Brie [Larson] got into this argument, and the first time they did it, it was on script, and then they went off, and it took my breath away, because it was so accurate. The words might not have been 100% what we said, boy was it what we said. And then there were times the words were what I actually said to dad. Woody said things off script – when he went off script, he said things that my dad had said I never told him. That is how accurate his read on my father was. So I just trusted him. He would say “I think Rex would have done this,” and he was right. There was a scene where the way he plucked up the door where they squat, he had dad’s expression. Just the little way he did it jaunty, oh my god, that was dad. And I showed the trailer to my mom, and she goes “that looks like Rex. That looks like our car. That looks like our house in Virginia.” So I trusted them. It’s not a documentary where everything was word for word, but the essence was always dead on.

Can you tell us what kind of advice you would give to children, students, or anyone who is going through a very similar situation where the parents show love and affection but at the same time are negligent?

JW: I get letters from kids all the time who have read my story. “I am living in a house without indoor plumbing,” or “my parents drive a rundown car,” or my father is an alcoholic,” and it’s just “tough it out, honey. You’re stronger than you realize. You will get out of this.” I honestly believe that those who gove through tricky chanellging childhoods can be an advantage over those who don’t. Because it will give you gifts of survival of learning how to deal with difficult situations that will become very valuable later on in life. Just tough it out and believe in yourself.

So more perservance than optimism?

JW: Both. Both. Optimism can go into overdrive as it did with my mother. Perseverance, that belief in yourself, and optimism in terms of not being delusional, but in terms of understanding that you are going to get through. If you will let yourself allow to pull through this and use it later on in life, use the lessons that you are going to learn, and navigate this difficult situation. When I was working at a snooty magazine, this very well-to-do woman wanted to go on a vacation with me – she didn’t know about my past – and she wanted me to something called outward bounds, and I never heard of this outward bound thing. So she explains to me that you pay a lot of money to live out in the wilderness and survive, and I’m thinking, “honey, the first 17 years of my life was outward bound. I know how to survive.” I thought it was hilarious, so I called my brother, and I realize that these people who have everything handed to them, they don’t know how strong they are. Those of us who endured, we know how strong we are, our challenge is to believe – we have to learn to believe we deserve something better. That’s their challenge. Sometimes if you go through tough times, you think you are not worthy, but that’s my lesson, you deserve something better. So just stick it out, because these things they are going through will be very valuable in life. Many of the most successful people I know have had really crappy childhoods, because they learn the tricks of survival, of navigating the landmines of life.

About the film

The Glass Castle – In theaters August 11.

Starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, Sarah Snook, and Robin Bartlett. Based on the best-selling memoir by Jeannette Walls.

The Glass Castle Book Review

Chronicling the adventures of an eccentric, resilient and tight-knit family, THE GLASS CASTLE is a remarkable story of unconditional love. Oscar® winner Brie Larson brings Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir to life as a young woman who, influenced by the joyfully wild nature of her deeply dysfunctional father (Woody Harrelson), found the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

Lionsgate presents, a Gil Netter/Lionsgate production. Screenplay by Destin Daniel Cretton & Andrew Lanham. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton.

The Glass Castle Goodreads

The Glass Castle Goodreads Book