内容简介

Amazon.com

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

作者简介

珍妮特·沃尔斯（Jeannette Walls），美国著名记者。撰有《闲聊：流言世界的内幕》、《闲聊：流言如何变成新闻，新闻怎样成为另一场秀》等书。2005年出版回忆录《玻璃城堡》，首次公开自己鲜为人知、与众不同的家庭背景和成长经历，凭借此书蜚声文坛。

现与丈夫约翰·泰勒（John Taylor）长住纽约城和长岛。

精彩摘录

我们跟着举杯致敬。有那么一个时刻，我恍若听到父亲开怀的笑声。屋外，天色暗了。一阵风起，将玻璃窗震得咯咯作响，烛火突然闪烁了一下，好像正游走于混沌与秩序的边缘

——引自第381页

而且当我第一次给他看我的伤疤时，他说这很有趣。他使用“有纹理”这个词汇，他说“光滑”令人乏味，但“有纹理”却很有趣，而且伤疤意味着我比任何曾经试图伤害我的东西都要强壮。

——引自第368页