the most perfect memoir I've ever read

I dare you to take longer than three days to read Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle. My guess is that you won't be able to put it down, that it will keep you up at night, that you will neglect work/children/exercise/dinner to turn as many pages as you can before you get so tired the words blur together and your eyes hang heavy.

Walls tells the story of her bizarre, tragic, and unique childhood, growing up with parents who preferred to run from the law rather than obey it. Her life story is so unusual and unbelievable that I kept forgetting that the book wasn't a piece of fiction. After each chapter, I wondered how the rest of the book could be any stranger, but each chapter brought with it new and bizarre episodes of Walls' life. Despite her alcoholic father, living conditions so bad that she had neither heat/air nor indoor plumbing nor a refrigerator, the book isn't as depressing as you'd expect.

Walls makes a brilliant move by writing the memoir from her perspective as a child, so many of her experiences, which adults would understand as awful and wrong, were simply normal to her as a child. The story, then, has an innocence and resilience to it that gives hope and redemption to an otherwise heartbreaking childhood.

From the first sentence to the last, I really don't think I've ever read a more perfect memoir. I read a lot of nonfiction, so for me to say that this is my favorite is really saying something. If you've read it already, I'd love to hear what you think! If not, pick up a copy as soon as you can. I promise you won't be sorry.