The Glass Castle A Memoir By Jeannette Walls Sum

Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle is a memoir of unbreakable spirit and salvation: an account of the life of a dysfunctional yet oddly vivacious family. When sober, Jeannette's father was creative and ambitious. He taught them geology, physics, and how to take on life without doubt or fear. When drunk, he was untruthful and violent. Meanwhile, Jeannette's mother was indifferent and free-spirited. She detested the concept of domesticity, and she disliked the responsibility that came with raising children. Jeannette and her siblings were compelled to look after themselves and fend for one another. Together, they endured. When they had settled in New York, their parents followed—not minding the fact that they had nowhere to stay—just so they could come together as a family once again.

Journalist Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family. When the money ran out, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town Rex had tried to escape. As the dysfunction escalated, the children had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they found the resources and will to leave home. Yet Walls describes her parents with deep affection in this tale of unconditional love in a family that, despite its profound flaws, gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life. -- From publisher description.

Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production in the United States? If so, what is causing it? Are memoirs all written by narcissistic hacks for an unthinking public, or do they indicate a growing need to understand world events through personal experiences? This study seeks to answer these questions by examining memoir as an industrial product like other products, something that publishers and booksellers help to create. These popular texts become part of mass culture, where they are connected to public events. The genre of memoir, and even genre itself, ceases to be an empty classification category and becomes part of social action and consumer culture at the same time. From James Frey’s controversial A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, computer hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way American readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences. The memoir boom is one of the ways that citizenship as a category of belonging between private and public spheres is now articulated.

What's Your Book? is an aspiring author’s go-to guide for getting from idea to publication. Brooke Warner is a publishing expert with thirteen years’ experience as an acquiring editor for major trade houses. In her book, she brings her unique understanding of book publishing (from the vantage point of coach, editor, and publisher) to each of the book's five chapters, which include understanding the art of becoming an author, getting over common hurdles, challenging counterproductive mindsets, building an author platform, and ultimately getting published. Brooke is known for her straightforward delivery, honest assessments, and compassionate touch with authors. What's Your Book? contains the inspiration and information every writer needs to publish their first or next book.

Recounts how the author journeyed from an idealistic, freedom-loving youth to a jaded and financially struggling father of four and how a catastrophic flood helped him to reconnect with the faith and courage of his childhood. 25,000 first printing.

Baring the Truth in Your Memoir When you write a memoir or personal essay, you dare to reveal the truths of your experience: about yourself, and about others in your life. How do you expose long-guarded secrets and discuss bad behavior? How do you gracefully portray your family members, friends, spouses, exes, and children without damaging your relationships? How do you balance your respect for others with your desire to tell the truth? In The Truth of Memoir, best-selling memoirist Kerry Cohen provides insight and guidelines for depicting the characters who appear in your work with honesty and compassion. You'll learn how to choose which details to include and which secrets to tell, how to render the people in your life artfully and fully on the page, and what reactions you can expect from those you include in your work--as well as from readers and the media. Featuring over twenty candid essays from memoirists sharing their experiences and advice, as well as exercises for writing about others in your memoirs and essays, The Truth of Memoir will give you the courage and confidence to write your story--and all of its requisite characters--with truth and grace. "Kerry Cohen's The Truth of Memoir is a smart, soulful, psychologically astute guide to first-person writing. She reveals everything you want to know--but were afraid to ask--about telling your life story." --Susan Shapiro, author of eight books including Only As Good as Your Word, and co-author of The Bosnia List

From Jeannette Walls, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, comes a riveting new novel about an indomitable young woman in Virginia during Prohibition. Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who’d amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger. You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.

How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature From drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers. Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same friendly instruction and stimulating exercises along with updated information on current memoir writing trends, ethics, internet research, and even marketing ideas. You'll discover how to turn your untold life stories into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs by learning to open up memory, access emotions, shape scenes from experience, develop characters, and research supporting details. This guide will teach you to see your life more clearly and show you why real stories are often the best ones.

For decades you've been told that addiction is an irreversible disease, a biological force over which you have no control. That defeatist message not only is without scientific foundation, but actually prevents your overcoming addiction. Now, world-renowned addiction expert Stanton Peele demystifies addiction and offers a groundbreaking program that puts at your disposal what does work in treatment and recovery. For four decades, Dr. Peele has challenged our understanding of addiction and recovery. He has developed approaches that break the cycle of addiction and empower us to take control of our lives--including understanding that we are able to direct our own brains to change. In Recover!Dr. Peele's PERFECT Program takes you through the key concepts of mindfulness--that is, your ability to detach from your addictive experience and to see that it is not who you are--combined with the Buddhist idea of loving kindness, or self-acceptance. It's an easily grasped, yet multifaceted program that allows your true self to overcome your addictive urges. Instead of focusing on what's wrong with you, the PERFECT Program will help you discover, embrace, and build your recovery on what's already right about you. Combining the best evidence-based treatments with the mindful use of meditation, Recover!presents a life-transforming philosophy for freeing yourself from addiction forever.

“Memories of a Redneck-Hillbilly Family” is a memoir, but it functions more like an autoethnography rather than a strict memoir. Jeannette Walls’ memoir the Glass Castle reveals a few painful family truths as mine does; however, my tale is not as chronological in form. It is not a mere tale about me or my family, but it is about examining the blood roots from the hillbilly line that originates from Eastern Kentucky. J. D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis would be closer to my story as he examined the hillbilly culture in his memoir. My thesis, though, stands a bit apart from other work of its nature. The goal of my thesis was to uncover why I am so different from my family. In this, I seek to understand how much of certain family traits are genetic. I examine the influence from the imprint of hillbilly isolation and living that created people that are family orientated but so set in their ways that even their language has changed little over the course of centuries. In fact, the hillbilly dialect stands virtually unchanged, and one of the only forms of dialect that mirrors Elizabethan language, its Anglo-Saxon roots obvious from the Scott-Irish history. However, I maintain the Rednecks are a separate group of white people living throughout America that have their own culture and values similar yet distinctly differ from their hillbilly cousins. I can see both influences in my immediate family. My work seeks to uncover why I do not follow the paths of my siblings or even many of my hillbilly cousins. Can understanding family members work to help a person understand who they are? Are some traditions or traits so much a part of us that no amount of education can eradicate them? If so, is that okay?