Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

While I deeply respect the right of other reviewers to disagree with my personal assessment of a book, I think what we have here is a bunch of people who barely read or skimmed "Glass Castle" for the highlights and have utterly missed the message of the book. This is NOT a harrowing account of an impoverished family, ala "Angela's Ashes." The following is so important that I wish I could boldface it, or put stars around it: Jeanette Wall's family was WEALTHY -- they were MILLIONAIRES. They were NOT poor....they were, however severely mentally ill. I wish I could somehow emphasize that. Despite living in squalor and abusing their children, the Walls family had a great deal of inherited wealth -- money that was still around when Rose Mary Walls (the mother) was an older woman living as a squatter in a hovel in New York City. I believe a great deal of Rose Mary's "ditsiness", and her apalling insensitivity sprang from a priviledged life where she never had to deal with ordinary problems such as taking care of children, obtaining safe housing or clean food. This, combined with a severe mental illness and a husband who was lost early on to severe alcoholism, lead to the tragedies described in the book. It is a little difficult to tell, therefore, how much of the book is factually true and how much of it is embellished by daughter Jeanette, who apparently escaped nearly unscathed by her experiences to a college education and immensely successful career. I don't believe that the entire story is fabricated, but I think there has been a certain amount of "creative license" employed here to make the story more dramatic. One particular problem I have is that after the adult Jeanette becomes educated and wealthy (she lives on Park Avenue, and has a career as a society gossip columnist), she fails utterly to recognize her parents mental illness and incompetence to live an even minimally decent life. As an adult, I feel that Jeanette had a legal and moral responsiblity to have her parents declared incompetent, and use their multi-million dollar assetts to have them treated medically for their illnesses (probably some kind of psychosis for the mother, obviously severe alcoholism for her dad). There was no lack of funds, either in her parents extensive wealth or her own lavish Park Avenue existence -- it is terribly hard to believe that she just "allowed" them to live homeless on the streets for years (and still does). I have a few other problems such as the fact that Jeanette describes being filthy and wearing rags as a child, yet her school pictures show a clean, well-dressed and apparently normal little girl. It does make me think that she has exaggerated things a bit -- perhaps because mental illness (which can be inherited) is so much scarier than just have parents who are "hippies" or "colorful" or simply incompetent at living a normal life. Still and all, you cannot evaluate this memoir properly unless you acknowledge the above FACTS...to describe this as a book about a child surviving poverty is so incorrect as to render the book meaningless.