Yes, The Glass Castle Is Banned!

Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir recounts her childhood with parents who were equal parts brilliant and catastrophically irresponsible. Her father Rex was a charismatic alcoholic who could explain physics to his kids but couldn’t hold a job. Her mother Rose Mary was an artist who painted while her children went hungry. The family moved constantly, lived without electricity or running water, and the children largely raised themselves. The “glass castle” of the title is a solar-powered house Rex promised to build and never did.

The book was the 17th most banned and challenged title between 2010 and 2019, and the 9th most challenged in 2012 alone. In Shade-Central City, Pennsylvania, parents challenged it in the 10th-grade English curriculum over descriptions of sexual assault, alcoholism, and abuse. Moms for Liberty challenged it in Bedford County, Virginia in 2022 alongside several other titles. In Traverse City, Michigan, a parent called it “explicit and disturbing.” Wisconsin’s Waukesha School District fielded challenges over its depictions of poverty and abuse. The book has spent years on high school reading lists because it’s unflinching about the damage parents can do while genuinely loving their children.

Why You Should Read This

The book describes childhood sexual abuse, extreme neglect, and alcoholism. Walls wrote about these experiences because they shaped who she became, and because silence about family dysfunction is its own kind of prison.

Walls doesn’t write about her parents with bitterness. That’s the most remarkable thing about this book. Rex Walls taught his daughter to swim by throwing her in a river and taught her to fight by making her box with him. He was also the man who drank away Christmas dinner and lit the family’s apartment on fire. Walls holds both truths at once without choosing between them.

The memoir became a bestseller because millions of people recognized something in it. Not the specific details, but the experience of loving people who are bad for you. Walls escaped her family’s orbit and built a successful life, and she’s honest about how much of her parents she still carries with her. That honesty is what makes the book worth reading, and what makes some adults so determined to keep it out of teenagers’ hands.