Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children and they had them because they wanted them. But they didn’t want to raise them. “It was almost like they were wild animals – I gave birth to you, now find your own food.”

They moved along Southwest desert towns like nomads until the money ran out. It pushed them back into a dismal neighbourhood of a small mining town from which they had originally escaped. Rose sunk into depression and Rex into alcohol, both becoming increasingly unable to love and care for Jeannette and her brother and sisters.

When Jeannette was only three years old, she was severely burned while boiling hot dogs, and once she had to wait in the desert sun until her parents realized she was missing: “while she scraped off the blood, her father plucked pebbles out of her face with pliers.”

In spite of these unforgivable instances, The Glass Castle doesn’t sound like a “misery” memoir and when the author remembers her parents with much awe and affection, you may just convince yourself that ultimately all that wasn’t abuse but a magical, surreal adventure. “Even as she describes how their circumstances degenerated, how her mother sank into depression and how hunger and cold – and Rex's increasing irresponsibility, dishonesty and abusiveness – made it harder to pretend, Walls is notably evenhanded and unjudging. Readers will marvel at the intelligence and resilience of the Walls kids. We root for them when they escape, one by one, to New York City, where Jeannette attended college, married and found work as a magazine columnist,” said Francine Prose in Sunday Book Review.

Within two years of its publication, The Glass Castle had sold close to three million copies and had been translated into 22 languages. The memoir won the Christopher Award and the American Library Association's Alex Award. It remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 261 weeks.

Published in 2005.