Author:
Format: Paperback, Unabridged-CD
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: Jan 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs
Retail Price: $18.99
Pages: 304
Jeannette Walls’s memoir revolves around her parents, who give the concept of bad parenting a whole new meaning. Her irresponsible romantic of a father was an inventor of outlandishly useless devices, and her mother, an artist, was his abettor. As the two of them dragged the family around the country on the run from creditors and from one bad idea to another, they virtually ignored their four hapless children, except when they were giving them shoplifting lessons or stealing their money for booze. Walls writes about these years with a hardheaded, clear-eyed acceptance and very little recrimination, and she doesn’t neglect her parents’ virtues, which she manages to wrest out of the slag heap: their values were both generous and idealistic, they produced self-reliant children, and they were true originals.
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This book was by far one of the best books I have read in a long time. A must read!
After you read this book, you will never want to whine about your life again. I know I did. Jeanette Walls shares stories from her childhood that mostly revolves around her eccentric and irresponsible parents. She recounts these episodes without a tinge of regret or bitterness-- an attitude that I think made her succeed as an adult. This book made me think about how attitude can mean everything in life, and that accepting others as they are even though they don't fit your ideal can make life less of a struggle and more of an experience in openness and love.
GREAT READ FROM BEING TO END!!! I WOULD EVEN GO SO FAR AS TO SAY OUT OF THE MAYBE FIVE MEMOIRS I'VE READ THIS WAS BY FAR THE BEST!!!
I couldn't put this one down. 300 pages went by so quickly. I read a lot and this one really made an impression on me. How a family can survive the way this one did is unbelieveable. The real shock is how this woman could actually have any sort of relationship with her parents once she is an adult.
great, read it in one day