Yes, it looks interesting. It's a pity they described Jeanette Walls as a gossip columnist though. She wrote the autobiographical, "The Glass Castle", which is one of the most amazing books I have read recently. Everyone I have recommended it to at the library has eventually gone out and bought their own copy after reading it.
Naomi Klein is one of the better young writers around today, and it would be worth hearing her speak.
I'll pass this article on to my friends. I might even go myself, although it would normally take something really special for me to fight the Toronto traffic these days.
Dancer, I just finished the glass castle (from amazon.com) and I'm totally in shock. I read the intro and the first chapter of memoirs and I almost gave up. It was terribly distressing. I put it aside and resumed it last evening. I finished it today.
I'm glad that I decided to resume reading it. The overall message was powerful and positive.
But it shows that children sometimes have to become the parents at a very early age!!
Posts: 6255 | Location: British Columbia, Canada | Registered: 06-11-02
I'm glad you managed to finish "The Glass Castle" Babs, and I hope it didn't upset you too much.
Wasn't it an incredible memoir? Remember James Frey's " A Million Little Pieces," and how he was subsequently crucified by the media for presenting a partially fictional account of his drug re-hab experience as fact? Well, I kept expecting someone to come forward and debunk Walls' account of her childhood, but I haven't seen anything yet. I know that 20/20, or some such show, ran a piece on her, and she presented, as she does in the book, as someone who has overcome a bizarre childhood, and matured to be a successful and well balanced adult.
There's a fine line between charming eccentricity and total craziness. For example early in the book, the author is standing on a chair at the stove, at I think about three years old, cooking hotdogs for herself, while her mother (an artist) is painting in the other room. The little girl's dress catches fire and she ends up in hospital needing skin grafts.
That's bad enough, but then you read that a few weeks after she's released from the hospital, she's back at the stove cooking for herself again, because her mother says she needs to "get back in the saddle."
Yes, it really is an amazing tale of the resilience of the human spirit. I was left wondering how her siblings made out in their lives though. I don't think she tells us too much about them as adults. I have lent my copy to so many people that it is pretty dog eared now, but I'll probably reread it again myself sometime.
fight the traffic??/ just take the Via rail train from Kitchener to Toronto-go down in the early morning to via rail-park your vehicle(yes you pay a price to leave it there ) and take the train early to Toronto and come back on the train leaving about 5 or 5:30 or so PM and you get back in Kitchener about 7:30PM
just go google via rail Canada and you should be able to see all the info or call 1-800-361-1235
Nah..I'd get lost in Toronto cyber..you know my sense of direction is bad, even if I made it to Union Station. Heck, I'm the person that got on the highway, heading for Toronto one time, and almost got to Detroit before I realised I was going west instead of east! I think I'd need a chaperone, even if I went by train
The impression I got was that the brother and older sister made good choices but the youngest girl was pretty messed up. She had been with the parents when the older ones left home, and had bounced around the community as various people tried to help her. I think it was the sibling solidarity that saved the three.
One has to wonder at their determination to keep the family together, even when they were teens, and realized how crazy their parents were, still they lied to child protection services to protect those ghastly parents.
One has to wonder, also, at the parents' willingness to turn to the paternal grandparents when the maternal grandmother died. That was the sickest part of all. The father was so eager to 'protect' his children from all sorts of 'government conspiracies', but placed them in the power of his own abusers.
If this were a work of fiction I would have discarded it, half-read, as too unlikely to be 'good' fiction in the dysfunctional-family genre.
Posts: 6255 | Location: British Columbia, Canada | Registered: 06-11-02
