The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls Scribner, NY 2005 Jeannette Walls’ memoir of her life in Arizona, California, West Virginia and eventually New York, makes clear that her life contained devastating elements. It’s a fantastic story. Walls is a journalist and she writes a lovely chronological narrative. The detail, including dialogue that rings true, is exquisite, even if the whole story is hard to watch and you want to turn your head as if you came upon a wreck but can’t quite manage it. Her story is big in the sense that it is loaded with characters all of whom are not quite like anybody we know—personally, anyway. Maybe one or two distant figures, maybe a relative or two, but in Walls’ case, the characters and personalities of her parents are extreme. As a reader, you find yourself asking how they got that way. Walls details visits with her grandparents and you see to some extent why her parents might think and act as they do. Both parents are exceptionally intelligent. And they’re irking. But the latter characteristic is not Walls’ fault. She has siblings, and I suppose that if anything were depicted grossly inaccurately, then they would have spoken out. But despite the numerous times that she comes close to death, not just disaster, you shudder, especially when you realize the parents are at fault. What extraordinary luck she and her siblings had to survive. Yet Walls is successful today. Maybe it is that brilliance she inherited from her parents. I love memoir. It’s what I write, but I dragged my feet to read Walls’ book for a couple reasons: One, I had many other books I needed to read first, and two, I’d heard that, although she supposedly was accurate about describing her few years that she lived in Welch, West Virginia, the portrait she painted of the area was unrelentingly negative. As to Walls’ time in Welch—honestly—I tried to take her at her word, even though I was doubtful about her life and times in Arizona and California as well. It was too fantastic. Because I am a memoirist, I’m the first to know that the perceptions of a child, now writing as an adult, are not necessarily exact. But as a native of West Virginia, there are a number of details that didn’t ring true to me. Running from child protection agencies in Arizona to West Virginia, neither Walls nor her siblings had school transfer papers. When they arrive in Welch and Walls and her mother go to the school to enroll her, the principal asks Walls, “et tahm sebm.” What? she and her mother ask (and I’m asking the same thing). It seems he was asking her what is “eight times seven.” Since she couldn’t answer, he deemed her slow. He put Walls and her siblings in remedial classes (in Arizona, they were in gifted classes). Well, let me see. Granted, someone in any county in WV could have an accent (including me). But what she wrote as an indication of a thick accent sounded more like a speech impediment (and she couldn’t possibly insult folks with a speech problem, now could she?). So, was that depiction of the school principal accurate? It seems that scores of kids beat her up every day on the playground (the teachers were all blind, I guess, or didn’t care). A teacher makes fun of her in front of the entire class because she didn’t have her transfer papers. Well, there are cruel kids and teachers everywhere. Most teachers I knew in grade school (and Walls and I are contemporaries), would never have dreamed of doing that, but I guess she doesn’t happen to remember anyone’s kindness, or at least, not enough to mention. But my overwhelming experience at school during the same time period in another part of the state was different. Years later, her experience eases and she finds a few folks to support her dream of getting the heck out of West Virginia. Can’t say I blame her if that’s all she experienced. Whatever her perception is becomes her word, and she is not required by any law or even personal compulsion to defend her opinion of her own life. And I’m glad of that. I don’t appreciate anyone telling me what my perception must be of my own life. However, that also doesn’t mean that I have to accept her perception of Welch, WV, at face value, and that’s the point I want to make. There’s something else at work here, not just her perception. My point really is that this is about discrimination. How? Her experience is her experience—you’ve said so!—you might say to me. But I’m talking about fundamental perceptions that make it easy for us to accept someone’s image of a region and simply not question it.   West Virginia, at the hands of Walls’ description, remains the same old stereotypical story. Was it bleak at the time Walls lived in Welch? I suppose so, well, at least on her street. The rest of the town, I don’t know, she doesn’t say. Was she subjected to grinding poverty? Yup. Just as she was in Arizona and California, too. Welch, and I’m sure many other areas in other states at that time, was economically depressed. The coal boom was over, wreaking havoc on many hard-working folks. Incest? Walls indicates this is so, and further, it seems to explain her father’s behavior as a victim of his mother’s treatment. Might it have happened had her relatives lived in Arizona or California? Incest is a despicable crime anywhere and any time that it happens. Is it rampant in my state? I hardly think so, but many would like to just believe it without bothering to find out the facts. It’s easy, so we’re told over and over, to believe that all West Virginians are toothless, incestuous, and poor as church mice. It’s all we’ve heard for 150 years, so something that’s perpetuated as truth for that long must have some veracity, yes? Surely no where else has suffered such lengthy misconceptions, right?   It’s not likely that her agent or editor might have questioned the overwhelmingly negative West Virginia of Walls’ experience. The NY agents and editors, from what I witnessed recently at a conference have a stereotypical image of Appalachia. One editor’s claim: “I’ll publish a book from Appalachia if it’s well written” is loaded with assumptions. I know that Walls’ time in this state was very difficult, and my complaint may seem petty if even half of what she says about Welch is accurate. I don’t have anything personal against Walls. I wonder if she   allowed herself to be part of the discrimination of the reality of West Virginia specifically and of Appalachia in general, because, after all, such details sell books. We are making small inroads to counter the stereotypes, and I suppose it does take a good bit of time to reverse the dogma of a century and a half. And aren’t we all becoming globalized, homogenized anyway? So, I guess you could ask the larger question of me as to why I bother to take such details to task at all. West Virginia and Appalachia are the places where I come from, where I live now, so I don’t have any answers to give you other than that assertion. I know that you do have answers or opinions that you are saying to yourself right now.