The story of my relationship with this book stretches back to 2017, when I first returned home to Texas after living in other countries for more than a year. I was driving home from a supermarket, still relearning the feel of the steering wheel after so long, when I heard an interview with Jeannette Walls on NPR. There was a lot that was discussed in that interview that resonated deeply with me, and I actually got out my phone and hit record to catch some of her words for later. The words I wrote down were:

”...And one of the many lessons that I hope that I learned is that I underestimated people. People are good and kind, but I went around so ready to be looked down on and to be held in contempt - I’m a fighter and a scrapper and you look at me cross-eyed and I’ll take you out! And I was prepared for that. What I was unprepared for was the compassion, and the understanding. And it was such a life-changer for me that people - they get it, they get it somehow more than I did.”

It’s weird when another person’s experiences – especially their trauma – resonate with you both for their similarities and for their vast differences. If this account is even 50% accurate, Jeannette had a childhood so insane, there are parts where I was asking “how did you not break? How did you not crumble under this?” But the thing is, I already know that answer. Everyone who has had to deal with more on their plate than a child should have (which is practically all of us) knows the answer. You push on. You’re resilient because you’re young, and that’s all you’ve known. And that’s all sorts of unfair to ask of someone to be, but it is just how it is. Whether you shove it down, or gloss it over, or smash it apart, it’s in you forever and always. That’s what Jeanette was talking about. People “get it” because everyone has a little shard of pain and hardship in them, and its feeling these stories in your gut that gives you new ways of examining, expressing, and hopefully transforming them.

Memoir is always a wild ride to me. Even the most humdrum retelling is still a perspective on those events that is colored and fractured through a million different lenses, like a pinball ricocheting off of endless pegs. So when Jeanette starts off with a replay of a talk with her mother, and details the strange shame she has about her past, you’re left wondering how she got here. As the story unfolds, and you see each piece come into place, you get it. You get the shame, the frustration, and in the end the resignation that wind their way through this book, manifested in every family member at one time or another. And you also see those little bursts of joy that keep people holding on, and you wonder sometimes if those little bright spots helped or hurt in the long run.

I don’t know. The hardest to stomach for me was the steadily creeping disappointment that Walls felt as she matured and began to see her parents from an adult perspective. Everyone, I think, goes through that period of disillusionment with their parents where they are no longer idolized but seen as flawed humans like everyone else. Perhaps it ached because this realization came over so many beat downs and disappointments and terrible, dangerous choices; perhaps it is how misguided that childlike love and devotion for someone who has only let you down is. Its a painful but universal lesson to learn. I don’t know. Like the great myths, sometimes our challenges and our folly must be writ so large that the stark relief of them forces you to contend with them, and forces you to cope.

I’ll be thinking of this one for a long time after. I’ll be thinking about how you have to wrestle with forgiveness of abuse, especially when one side never acknowledges it for what it was. That’s probably the one thing I wish I had been able to see: that moment mentioned so briefly where they finally aired their grievances. Maybe that’s me seeking a “narrative ending” to a life that doesn’t have neat bows, and maybe I wanted it because a part of me wishes I could do that to the people who have wronged me. But I think Walls left that out because that’s not what her memoir was about. It wasn’t about justice. It was that compassion that she mentioned in that interview from so long ago. It was about coming to terms with the joy – and the pain – that had been passed on to her. And I’m glad for that.