I was sitting in a taxi on my way to a party, worrying if I was overdressed, when I looked out the window and saw my mother rooting through a Dumpster. I was on Park Avenue, in pearls and a silk dress, and she was fifteen feet away, wrapped in rags against the March wind. Seeing her there, I was overcome with a familiar cocktail of love and shame. I slid down in my seat and told the driver to take me home. Later, over lunch at her favorite Chinese restaurant, I told her I wanted to help. "I'm fine," she said, pointing her chopsticks at me. "You're the one who needs help. Your values are all confused." When I confessed I'd hidden from her, she just nodded. "You see? You're way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it." "And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?" I asked. "Just tell the truth," Mom said. "That's simple enough."
It's my earliest memory. I was three years old and on fire. Standing on a chair in our trailer in southern Arizona, I was cooking hot dogs for myself in a pink tutu dress when the flames caught the fabric and climbed my body. The hospital was a wonderland of quiet and order, of clean white sheets and endless chewing gum. But my parents' world was one of motion and chaos. When my family came to visit, their laughter echoed through the quiet halls. My father, Rex, told me hospitals were for quacks and that he should have taken me to a Navajo witch doctor. After six weeks, he decided I'd had enough of the antiseptic joint. He swept me up in his arms, smelling of whiskey and cigarettes, and we checked out, Rex Walls–style - running down the emergency stairs as a nurse shouted for us to stop. A few days later, I was back at the stove, cooking hot dogs. "You've got to get right back in the saddle," Mom said. "You can't live in fear of something as basic as fire."
We were always doing the skedaddle, fleeing in the middle of the night from bill collectors Dad called “the gestapo.” We lived like nomads in dusty mining towns across the desert, our home the backseat of a beat-up Plymouth. Mom, an artist, taught us to find beauty in the severity of the landscape, to identify edible plants, and to wash with a single cup of water. Dad, a brilliant but erratic engineer, taught us geology, physics, and how to shoot his pistol. Life was an adventure, full of grand deprivations and sudden windfalls. We'd gorge on cantaloupes from a derailed train or grapes picked during a strike, then go hungry for days. We slept under the stars, Dad pointing out the constellations. He told us we were luckier than the rich city folks who couldn't even see the sky.
Dad was a master storyteller, and his greatest story was the one he was still writing for us. He carried the blueprints everywhere we went for the Glass Castle, a magnificent house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would be made entirely of glass and powered by solar cells. All we had to do was find gold, and he was working on a contraption called the Prospector to do just that. He was a genius who could fix anything, but he had what Mom called a “little bit of a drinking situation.” When he stuck to beer, life was fun and a little scary. But when he hit the hard stuff, he became an angry-eyed stranger who smashed furniture and raged at Mom. Still, at night, he would tell us stories of his heroics, and I believed every word. One Christmas, when we had no money for presents, he took me out into the desert night. "Pick out your favorite star," he said. I chose Venus. "It's Christmas," he said. "You can have a planet if you want."
The adventure began to curdle when we moved to Welch, West Virginia, Dad's grim, impoverished hometown. We were banished to live with his mother, Erma, a bitter, abusive woman who despised us. Welch was a place trapped in a cold, damp hollow, covered in coal dust. The magic of the desert was replaced by a gritty, gnawing hunger. At school, I was bullied for being poor and skinny, my lard sandwiches a source of ridicule. We kids learned to fend for ourselves, scrounging for food in garbage cans and picking up stray lumps of coal along the road. The house Dad finally bought for us on Little Hobart Street was a dilapidated shack on a steep hillside with no plumbing and a roof that leaked like a sieve. We dug a foundation for the Glass Castle in the backyard, but as the months wore on with no money and no progress, Dad told us to use the hole for garbage.
Lori, my older sister, was the first to understand that we had to save ourselves. She dreamed of escaping to New York City to become an artist. Brian and I joined her mission, and together we saved every dollar we could from odd jobs, stashing the money in a pink plastic piggy bank we named Oz. It was our joint escape fund. But one night, I came home to find Oz slashed open and empty. Dad had stolen our future. The betrayal was absolute, the final proof that he would never build the Glass Castle or save us. I told Lori she would still get out, I swore it. I arranged for her to work as a nanny for the summer, a job that came with a one-way bus ticket to New York. The day she left, I knew I would be next. Dad saw the family falling apart. "It sure is," I told him.
The moment I finished junior year, I took a bus to New York myself. The city was an astonishment of light and noise and possibility. I found a job waiting tables, then as a reporter for a small newspaper in Brooklyn. I enrolled at Barnard College, piecing together loans, grants, and work to pay for it. One by one, my siblings followed. Brian came and eventually joined the police force. Then we sent for Maureen. For a time, we were all together again, living in the city, a world away from Welch. We had created the lives we'd wanted. But our new world was shattered when Mom and Dad showed up in a broken-down van, announcing they had moved to New York to be a family again.
They drifted through a series of flophouses and boarding rooms before their money ran out. Soon, they were homeless, sleeping on park benches. I was living on Park Avenue by then, in a life so different from theirs it felt like a lie. I tried to help, but Mom insisted that being homeless was an adventure, a choice. “I'm not a charity case,” she'd say, even as she was pulling a perfectly good discarded painting from a Dumpster. Dad, however, was fading. Years of hard living had finally caught up with him. He was only fifty-nine when he died of a heart attack. In the hospital, he took my hand. "Hey," he said, giving me a wink. "Have I ever let you down?" I just smiled.
Years later, we are all gathered for Thanksgiving at the country house I share with my second husband, John. Brian is a decorated police sergeant, a father, and he's restored a beautiful old house in Brooklyn. Lori is a freelance artist. Mom arrives wearing four sweaters and carrying shopping bags full of treasures she's found. She is still a squatter, but the city has sold her the building for a dollar. She tells us that Maureen, who moved to California after a breakdown, is thinking of visiting. As John carves the turkey, he proposes a toast. We all lift our glasses. Mom looks up at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. "I've got it," she says. "Life with your father was never boring." We clink our glasses together. Outside, a wind picks up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames dance, shifting along the border between turbulence and order.
