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I must confess that after 5 pages I was not going to read this memoir anymore. So I went here to Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of my GR friends had read this and if so, if they gave it 1 or 2 starsâ€�.so if there were next-to-no GR friends who had read it or if those who did gave it 1 or 2 stars that would indicate to me just to not even read this. But that was not the case; many of my GR friends had read it and had given it 4 or 5 stars. So I felt I should push on.

I will give her high points for her writing. She had me interested pretty much throughout the memoir. I read it in one sitting.

I don’t need to give a synopsis�.don’t need to tell you how horrified I was at times by her mother and her father…by some of the creeps she was forced to encounter given her mother and father’s neglect…and one time, the father outright encouraged some creep to have sex with his underage daughter…at that point in the book I have to say nothing much surprised me anymore but that one did.

So here is the problem I had several pages into the book: she is recalling her earliest memory when she was cooking hot dogs over the stove at the ripe old age of 3, and her dress caught on fire and she had some very bad burns on her body. Her mother took her to the hospital and the following is from the book:
� A doctor with silver hair and black-rimmed glasses lead my mother out of the room. As they left, I heard him telling her that it was very serious. The nurses remained behind, hovering over me. I could tell I was causing a big fuss, and I stayed quiet. One of them squeezed my hand and told me I was going to be OK. “I know,� I said, “but if I’m not, that’s okay, too.� The nurse squeezed my hand again and bit her lower lip.

It was the last two sentences that led me to question whether I wanted to go on with this book. The author had enough recall for something that happened when she was 3 years old � and granted it was traumatic � that she would remember the nurse biting her lower lip??? That a 3-year old would say and what’s more remember years later saying: “I know, but if I’m not, that’s okay, too.� ???

I just simply did not believe it. And so if I did not believe that, how much of the rest of what Jeannette Walls wrote about was truth versus fiction or poetic license? But I continued on after looking at the sheer number of my GR friends who read it and obviously very much liked it. I will take Jeannette Wall’s word that many of the things that occurred as written down by her in The Glass Castle did actually occur. But some of the stuff here and there as told by her in the memoir I have to believe she might have recalled vaguely but when writing the memoir fleshed out the events more than what she actually remembered. She wrote about many mundane events or conversations between people in such granular detail that at times, at least to me, it beggared belief.

Having said that…I must say it is over-the-top impressive that this memoir spent over 260 weeks in hardcover on The New York Times Best Seller list[1][2] and it remained on the paperback nonfiction bestseller list for 440 weeks (8 ½ years!!!). Kudos to Jeannette Walls.