Nevada (with some Arizona, West Virginia and NYC)
Suggested by: Jake
Traveled: July 26-28

So rewind for a second to my not-so-glowing review of Point of Direction in Alaska. I had this to say in my main critique of the debut novel: “People don’t need to have the royal flush of shitty, unbelievable circumstances to make them interesting. They don’t even need that to make them tragic.” I argued a few weeks ago that tragedy is more compelling when it comes from traumas rooted in some relatable reality. I’d rather be moved by subtlety than overt misfortune.

Jeannette Walls turns this premise completely on its head. In her head-shakingly good memoir, The Glass Castle, she demonstrates the power of holding the royalest of flushes of terrible circumstance, and not even touching the idea of tragedy. She tells her story of a childhood rife with circumstances few of us could even visualize, with a refreshing frankness and lack of drama. She doesn’t put on a saintly cheery outlook. She doesn’t wallow, and she doesn’t whine. She asks for no credit in succeeding to love and appreciate her (most likely) bipolar mother and alcoholic father, whose wild hare ideas and eccentricities kept her and her three siblings eating out of garbage cans most of their early years. She tells it just the way it is, and the end result comes out as a genuinely optimistic tale of family that challenges our strict obsessions with normality.

As a stop in the road trip, the portions of the book in Nevada are limited to the first half, and we spend at least as much time in a decaying shack in the hills of West Virginia. But her recollections of sleeping in the dry coldness of the Nevada desert and the fondness she has for an old railroad depot with an upright piano in the front yard are memorable. It’s a masterful work coming from the humblest of beginnings — I only wish there was more of it to read.