"The night the trailer burned down, I think Daddy was the one who set it on fire...." For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day, Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world where getting out seemed impossible. Where, at twelve years old, she taught herself to drive a truck so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. Where...

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.

Abused by an alcoholic, unemployed father, Doug Wallace and his seven siblings barely survived childhood--fleeing in the night from landlords, scrambling for food, and burning down the only home they ever owned to collect insurance money. In this raw testimony of a heart-breaking, hardscrabble childhood, Doug Wallace paints an unforgettable portrait of a child determined to free himself from the cycle of poverty that strangled his family for generations....