When it comes to branding — the kind that marks you for life — corporations have nothing on families. Jeannette Walls’s mother branded her children this way: Lori, the oldest, was the smart one. Maureen, the youngest, was the pretty one. Brian, the boy, was the brave one. And Jeannette? “The only thing going for you,” her mother informed her, “was that you worked hard.”
As I drove onto Walls’s 205-acre farm in Virginia and the Technicolor green grass and trees unfurled to reveal horses in their paddocks, it seemed clear that hard work had lost its power as a put-down.
When Walls published her memoir, “The Glass Castle,” in 2005, it became an instant classic. It tells the story of her outrageous upbringing by Rex, her alcoholic father who was probably bipolar, and Rose Mary, her mother, a self-described “excitement addict” who is a hoarder and also probably bipolar. The book has sold 4.2 million copies and been translated into 31 languages. Hollywood has threatened a movie version for years; Jennifer Lawrence was recently announced to play Walls.
“No one ever uses the front door!” Walls called, tearing out from behind the house. She is almost six feet tall, whippet thin, with a mane of dark red hair, wild at the possibility that I might enter her home the wrong way. Given her background, it’s no surprise that her default instinct is to impose order. Walls’s childhood was peripatetic, to say the least — her parents had 27 addresses in the first five years of their marriage. They were not only running out on the rent, but her father was convinced that the F.B.I. was after them. They finally landed in Rex’s Appalachian hometown, Welch, W.Va., in a three-room house without plumbing or heat, infested with snakes and rats. Walls says she still has nightmares about the yellow bucket the six of them used each night as a toilet.
Explanation:
is this a nice imformation??
