A new friend asked me what my favorite book was; I didn't have an answer, at least not a single one. He knew at once—it was The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls because it had the same chaotic energy of his childhood. I was drawn in almost immediately and found it hard to put down. It is a compelling memoir of familial dysfunction and resilience in the face of adversity.

It opens with three-year-old Jeannette Walls setting herself on fire as she leans over an oil stove to cook hot dogs in boiling hot water. Her mother sings in the next room as she works on a painting. An artist at heart, Rose Mary Walls does not have a maternal bone in her body.

Her father, Rex Walls, is an objectively better parent at first glance. When sober, he is the spitting image of an ideal father who takes his children on adventures, tells them stories, and teaches them everything they wouldn't find in books. He is an engineer and draws up blueprints for the glass castle he promises to build for them one day. Head full of dreams and eyes full of stars, he fails to be the parent he wants to be as he falls from one drunken stupor into another. This side of him is less charming—he is a rage-filled, wife-beating lunatic who cannot hold a job and cannot provide for his family.

This is a story of resilience but also one of dysfunction. How much dysfunction can an alcoholic father and a detached, impassive mother breed? So much that their children fill themselves with scraps from school garbage bins. So much that they live in a house with no heat, running water, or electricity. So much that the kids connive to coax their mother out of bed and to her job every morning. The Walls children survive by taking care of each other in the absence of a parental figure. They find a way out and eventually move to New York to forge new paths for themselves.

The glass castle is never built. It remains a metaphor for the life Rex Walls wanted his family to have—one that he could not provide for—and for the empty promises that carried his children through their growing years.

The Walls kids can't shake off their parents that easily. The parents follow them to New York and join the ranks of the homeless. We meet Jeannette as a grown woman who is an accomplished writer and has found the love of her life. Her mother, still homeless, visits her with trinkets scavenged off the streets of New York. Jeannette writes with grace and clarity about the hurt of her past, even as she comes to terms with it and weaves it into her present. How do you reconcile the life you are leaving behind with the life you are trying to build? There is no running away from the past, there is only growing out of it.

I give The Glass Castle 5/5 stars.