Apart from the genre itself, The Glass Castle also retains parallels with Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel, On the Road, another book whose characters wander across America, looking for their big break and struggling to find it. Indeed, some critics have complained about the preponderance of “misery memoirs” that recount a painful childhood and the author’s attempts to overcome it-though others have praised the honesty and transparency of the genre. The Glass Castle also recalls Mary Karr’s 1995 The Liars’ Club, which concerns yet another difficult childhood beset by abusive, alcoholic relatives. Like Styron, Walls was already well-known when she wrote The Glass Castle like McCourt, she was not yet known as a writer, and catapulted to fame with the memoir’s publication. Critics argue about when the precipitous rise in memoir writing began-some have pegged it on William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his 1990 book about struggling with depression, or on Frank McCourt’s 1996 Angela’s Ashes, about growing up impoverished with an alcoholic father in Ireland and New York. Rex Walls can be identified as an alcoholic father by most of. His disease puts a lot of strain on the family and relationships within the family and eventually, Jeannettes father dies from heart failure, a common disease caused by alcoholism. “This is the age of the memoir,” William Zinsser wrote in his 1998 book on the genre. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannettes father, Rex, shows signs of being an alcoholic.
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