Books like The Glass Castle
What should you read after Jeannette Walls’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Jeannette Walls
- 2005
- Memoir
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Glass Castle
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchEducated
Tara Westover
Another daughter raised outside the system by parents who distrusted it most, writing her way out. If the Walls parents fascinated and appalled you, Westover's will too.
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Children raising themselves
- No self-pity in the telling
- Angrier, less fond of home
Worth a look — with a warningHillbilly Elegy
J.D. Vance
The same shape of story — poor childhood, chaotic parents, a way out — except Vance keeps stopping to argue about why his people live the way they do.
- Poverty in plain detail
- Children raising themselves
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Half memoir, half political argument
Best for no self-pity in the tellingThe Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Karr is the writer who made this kind of memoir possible: a Texas childhood of guns, secrets and drink, told without a single line of pleading.
- No self-pity in the telling
- A childhood that reads as adventure
- Poverty in plain detail
- Denser, more literary prose
Great matchWild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
Three generations of women absorbing whatever the century throws at them. The family-endurance thread from Walls, stretched across a hundred years of Chinese history.
- No self-pity in the telling
- Poverty in plain detail
- Siblings as a survival unit
- History-heavy and very long
Best for parents you can't quite condemnThe Color of Water
James McBride
McBride hands half the book to his mother so she can explain herself, which is exactly the conversation you wanted Walls to have with Rose Mary.
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Poverty in plain detail
- Siblings as a survival unit
- Race and religion at the centre
Worth a look — with a warningThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Skloot writes poor American families with the same close, unpatronising eye, though the story here belongs to a woman whose cells outlived her by decades.
- Poverty in plain detail
- No self-pity in the telling
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Journalism, not memoir
Best for a childhood that reads as adventureAngela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
A drinking father, a mother barely holding on, and a boy who somehow makes it funny. The closest match in tone to Walls, one ocean and fifty years away.
- A childhood that reads as adventure
- Poverty in plain detail
- A father who promises a house
- Grimmer; children die
Great matchHalf Broke Horses
Jeannette Walls
Walls again, writing her grandmother's life as a novel — the woman who produced Rose Mary, which explains a great deal about the parents in the memoir.
- A childhood that reads as adventure
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Siblings as a survival unit
- Fiction, not memoir
Great matchBrother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Danticat's family memoir turns on two fathers and an immigration detention cell, and shares Walls's refusal to sort love and failure into separate boxes.
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- No self-pity in the telling
- Leaving home for New York
- Sadder, with a death at its centre
Worth a look — with a warningThe Soloist
Steve Lopez
For the part of Walls that passes a homeless parent on a New York street and cannot look away, Lopez stays in that moment for a whole book.
- Leaving home for New York
- Poverty in plain detail
- Parents you can't quite condemn
- Not a childhood story at all
Great matchMountains Beyond Mountains
Tracy Kidder
Kidder's portrait of Paul Farmer answers a question the memoir keeps raising: what it takes for one stubborn person to do something about poverty rather than survive it.
- Poverty in plain detail
- No self-pity in the telling
- Global health, not family
Worth a look — with a warningThe Glass Universe
Dava Sobel
Shares little with Walls beyond a word in the title and an appetite for overlooked lives, but Sobel's Harvard computers reward anyone who reads for stubborn women.
- No self-pity in the telling
- Poverty in plain detail
- History of astronomy, not memoir
Best for children raising themselvesThe Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer
A boy with an absent father assembles a set of substitute ones from the men at the local bar. The improvised-upbringing thread, in a gentler key.
- Children raising themselves
- A father who promises a house
- Leaving home for New York
- Working class, not destitute
What should you read after The Glass Castle?
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Educated by Tara Westover — another daughter raised outside the system by parents who distrusted it most, writing her way out. If the Walls parents fascinated and appalled you, Westover's will too.
If what stayed with you was poverty in plain detail, read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance instead: the same shape of story — poor childhood, chaotic parents, a way out — except Vance keeps stopping to argue about why his people live the way they do. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr is the other strong option — karr is the writer who made this kind of memoir possible: a Texas childhood of guns, secrets and drink, told without a single line of pleading.
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