Obstacles Of Life Exposed In The Glass Castle By Jeanette Walls

Imagine growing up on the streets, living in cars, in broken homes and then living in an apartment on Park Avenue in New York City. The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, is a memoir about Jeanette and her siblings childhood, going through poverty and parents who were were irresponsible, neglectful and careless. The memoir talks about the many obstacles their family faced and how they overcame them. Jeanette moving to New York symbolizes a new chapter in her life and becoming independent from her family, and finally breaking the “skedaddle” streak.
After high school, college is the next step in life. Jeanette found a job as a live-in nanny, and she started going to college at Barnard. This is a huge accomplishment for Jeanette. When Mike Armstrong, the boss of the weekly newspaper she worked at, tried to convince Jeanette to go to college, she stated “Why should I give up this job to go to college?” (Walls 220). Although she was hesitant at first, going to college completely changed her life. If Jeanette did not go to college, she would have never gotten the job at one of the biggest magazines in New York.

All her life she was so dependent on her parents and did not know a life outside of poverty. When she finally got her own apartment, she realized that this was a life she wanted to live. While she was in her Park Avenue apartment, she “started thinking about Mom and Dad. When they had moved into their squat - a fifteen-minute subway ride south and about half a dozen worlds away - it seemed as if they finally found the place where they belonged, and I wondered if I had done the same” (Walls 268). Although technically she did not own the apartment herself, she was living and paying for the apartment. She was able to say she lived on Park Avenue with a life she