Bookworm – Page 3 – …on the B.L.

Read Yes
Length 288
Quick Review A memoir about the difficulties of growing up in a dysfunctionally transient family with a fascinating and intelligent alcoholic of a father leading their way.

I read this book a few years ago, and it has stayed with me not just for the story but because of Walls’ writing. With the movie coming out in a few days, I power read it over the weekend. It is just as resonating a second time.

Jeannette Walls is a journalist in New York City with a degree from Barnard College. These are wonderful achievements, which help define her character and intelligence even more so considering what she overcame as a child. The Glass Castle is a testament to her resilience.

Walls was born in 1960 to Rex and Rose Mary. She is one of four children. Growing up she lived a nomadic life. Her father was a brilliant man. His children adored him before growing up to resent his alcoholism and inability to conform even a little. He was able to capture his children’s imagination through storytelling and science. The children were home schooled a great deal with an emphasis on living life through the absence of fear. With one parent abhorring the conformity of society, the children needed a grounded parent. They did not find it in their mother, Rose Mary. She was an artistic free spirit looking at feminine domesticity as a prison she would not tolerate. She dismissed her role as parent and mother.

Walls writes about the difficulties of growing up in secluded environment. She describes the bond between her siblings; how they would lean on each other for support, nourishment, clothing, and protection in a world where their parents were barely present.

All four Walls children went on to live in society as fully functional and present participants ending up in New York City. Rex and Rose Mary followed their children to New York. Rex died in 1994 from a heart attack after he and his wife chose to remain homeless despite offers of help from their children.

Walls is a wonderful writer. She does not shy away from brutal honesty. She meets her childhood trauma head on with the maturity in the realization it formed her into the well-respected and successful journalist and writer she is today.

Memorable Quotes
“You’ve got to get right back in the saddle. You can’t live in fear of something as basic as fire.”
“You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”
“She had her addictions and one of them was reading.”
“Life’s too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are”

Title: The Glass Castle
Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Scribner
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 9780743247542

Read Yes
Length 608
Quick Review This is an incredible psychoanalysis of women and the wild woman through storytelling. It’s an incredibly diverse and rich feminist text.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés is known for a lot of things. She has her PhD and is a well known Jungian analyst with storytelling experience reaching to her cultural roots as a Latina. She combines all expertise into Women Who Run With The Wolves a groundbreaking feminist work, which has remained popular since it was published over twenty years ago in 1992.

Women Who Run With The Wolves is a search for woman’s most inner woman, feelings, and history. Throughout history women have been molded and suppressed. Estés argues it is important to look at women throughout history and story to find their most quintessential essence. She believes it is important for women to be in touch with their inner wild woman, or they will go crazy in their suppressed role.

The book is a collection of fourteen stories from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Estés tells the story as traditionally as possible at the beginning of each chapter. After each recounting, she analyses every aspect of the story through a psychoanalytical and feminist lense. Each story offers an important learning opportunity for women to be in touch with themselves.

There is a reoccurring theme of life-death-life mother across many cultures. In today’s society, we often are confronted with the idea of life and death. Estés reiterates the idea of life-death-life as missing from most accounts of the evolution of life in Euro-centric culture. I think the missing reoccurrence of life is an equivalent to the pieces of ourselves as women we have lost of the years and generations of being molded into cultural ideals.

Women Who Run With The Wolves is not necessarily an easy read, but it is an important.

P.S. There would have been far more quotes, but I would have ended up infringing on copyright laws because I would have quoted the entire book.

Memorable Quotes
“This Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.”
“This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions.”
“So many women themselves are afraid of women’s power.”

Title: Women Who Run With The Wolves
Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
Publisher: Rider
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 9781846041099