The Glass Castle

"You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find laughter in anything, even poverty, you can survive it." Bill Cosby

This quote could have come straight from the pages of Jeannette Walls' memoir The Glass Castle. It focuses on the hardships her family faced and how they managed to survive - one of those ways was through laughter. Rex Walls, her father, was a master at not only making people laugh during a miserable situation, but also completely turning it around and no one remembered why they were upset. "Dad got out of the car, knelt down, and tried to give me a hug. I pulled away from him...he said, 'you busted your snot locker pretty good.' I started laughing really hard...I told Brian and Lori and Mom about the word, and they all started laughing as hard as me. It was hilarious" (Walls 31). (At the time this occurred, Jeannette had been hurled from the car and left stranded in the middle of the desert until the family came to retrieve her some time after.) Rex was not trying to get her to forgive him, he was just doing what a dad should do - comfort his child. However, that single statement was enough to make Jeannette forget all about what happened and proves laughter can lighten a situation. No matter who said it or how it was said or why, we are always looking for something to brighten a bad situation.

The second part of the quote explains how powerful laughter can be. According to Bill Cosby, even something as miserable and degrading as poverty can be lightened with a little humor. Throughout The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her family were forced to move from place to place with nothing but bare necessities. And yet, despite every time their father came home drunk or the roof leaked or there was no house to come home to at all, they survived. "We didn't have many toys, but you didn't need toys in a place like Battle Mountain. We'd get a piece of cardboard and go tobogganing...we'd jump off the roof...The thing we like to do most was go exploring in the desert" (54). Although they did not have much, the Walls were able to make the best of every situation. In this example, rather then whining about not having anything to do, they used their imaginations and came up with interesting ideas that brought hours and hours of fun. Laughter, in this sense, came from all the time Jeannette spent with her family having a good time and not worrying about their current social and financial situation.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0XVno-0gM&feature=related - This is a link to a video I found on YouTube with Jeanette Walls reciting parts of her book. Her mother is also in the video showing some of her paintings - she is actually a very good artist. I thought this would be a great way to associate the characters from The Glass Castle with the real people (kind of like when we saw those pictures of the Clutters and where they lived).