You are The Key to Your Own Success
A Review of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
We can all agree that you, yourself, is the only one who can decide who and what you want to be in life. Both the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and the article “U.S. Student Became Mexican Drug Kingpin” By James C. McKinley Jr. and Elisabeth Malkin help support this idea. The Glass Castle my Jeanette Walls is an autobiography about how Walls grew up in poverty but still succeeded in life against the odds. The article “U.S. Student Became Mexican Drug Kingpin” By James C. McKinley Jr. and Elisabeth Malkin talks about a Mexican-American man who grew up in a decent household, had about everything he could in order to do something with his life, but instead decided to become a drug dealer. These two pieces of literature teaches readers that no matter where you come from, or how you grow up, or what impact society has on you, evidently your goals and what you want to do in life is all up to you.
My definition of success is being content with who you are and what you have in life. At this point my only goal in life is to be a good person. The obstacles I may have to face before reaching that goal is probably deciding the difference between whats right and whats wrong, but then again we all have different definitions of that. The Glass Castle taught me that if you want to get anywhere in life you have to work for it and do it yourself. I say this because when Walls was growing up her parents did not really raise her in a way that would benefit her. She never had a stable home and she never went to school for very long, but she managed to get into an Ivy League school and become an author. Despite the path her parents had carved for her she had taken her own route. The same goes
Edgar Valdez Villarreal from the “U.S. Student Became Mexican Drug Kingpin” article. His parents planned for him to go to college, start a family, etc. but instead he decided to take a different path in life. The most inspirational part of The Glass Castle was the ending, when the whole family finally got together after Walls' father died, after all these years of not really communicating each other. “ Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too-- they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets”(Walls 270). It show's that they all got over their differences and decided to deal with each others individuality so that they could once again be a family. The reason this part of the book was so inspiring to me is because I hope that one day my family and I can be as close as theirs despite our differences.
The Glass Castle starts off with a scene of Walls watching her mom digging through a trashcan and her inside a car waiting to go to a party, but being to embarrassed to come out of the car, in case her mom might recognize her and start a scene.”I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster... To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City”(Walls 3). The book then flashes back to her earliest memory from her childhood and continues on from there with memories until it explains how it gets to point where her parents are homeless while she has money to spare. I liked the way the book was written because it captures you in beginning and keeps you reading because it doesn’t give anything away till the right moment.
I definitely would recommend this book to others. The glass castle gives you a real insight into what its like to live in poverty, to not have anything, but shows that handwork can get you anywhere. Jeanette walls is an amazing raconteur and tells her story with lots of imagery and detail. Both the article and The Glass Castle show that you must carve your own path in life. What everyone else thinks and what everyone else wants you to be should have no impact on what you think and what you want to be and do with your life.
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