The glass castle: a memoir

She went back to her crossword puzzle. After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa's. Being strong was ...

Everything in the house was damp. A fine green mold spread over the books and papers and paintings that ...

figured it must have belonged to the old lady who had lived there. She had died before we moved in. Ever ...

got to her. She retreated to her sofa bed and stayed there for days on end, crying and occasionally throwi ...

"It's not so bad," she said. Between each toe touch, she was reaching up into the air. "We haven't had anything ...

Street—were on welfare, and it wasn't so bad. I knew Mom was opposed to welfare, but those kids got food ...

Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ...

A week later, with the heat still holding, I ran into Dinitia Hewitt downtown. She had just ...

In the locker rooms I'd been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness ...

Dinitia and I stayed in the pool all morning, splashing, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly. She flailed ...

"Can I come in?" I could see he was trying to peer behind me into the house. I pulled the door all ...

"Good," the man said. "I will come back. Tell them that." He passed a business card through the crack ...

options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had begun painting on plywood, so she ...

Davy, a coal-mining camp twelve miles north of Welch. Since we still had no car, the school's principal ...

Mom also bought some electric heaters and a refrigerator on layaway, and we'd go to the appliance store ...

It couldn't be that hard, I thought. Other moms did it. I tried quizzing her. Was she spending the ...

try to be close friends. During lunch, Dinitia hung out with the other black kids, but we had a study ha ...

and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most, practically the only one that d ...

been to the dentist—but since I'd been babysitting and doing other kids' homework for cash, I resolved ...

When I tried it on, the coat hanger dug into the back of my skull, so I used a Kotex sanitary na ...