The Glass Castle

If you've read Running with Scissors, you might think, Oh, The Glass Castle. Memoir of a girl with nomadic, alcoholic parents, who had to forage for food and lived without running water or electricity and stole food from the trash can at school. I can dig it.
Except The Glass Castle isn't funny. Not at all. The opening scene is Jeannette Walls, the author, being burned by the fire from a gas stove when she was cooking hot dogs for herself. When she was 3 years old. No one else would make her lunch, so she just became self-sufficient and made it herself, and got horribly burned on her torso. And that's just the start of the book. It's beautifully written, but really, truly horrifying as well. Augusten Burroughs' books and essays have an undercurrent of happiness about them: Look, my mom gave me away to her psychiatrist and my life was insane, but really funny all at the same time. The Glass Castle has none of that. It's not an easy read, but it's compelling. I couldn't put it down.

Available in paperback - get it now.

The Glass Castle - A