My mom bought this book and gave it to me, warning me that while it was a remarkable story, she had stopped reading because it was too depressing.
Jeannette Walls, the author of this memoir, is a journalist who had a childhood so dysfunctional, people would laugh at it as absurd if it were written as fiction. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother an unsuccesful writer and artist, neither of whom ever held a job for more than a few weeks at a time and forced their children to raise, feed, and clothe themselves from when they were toddlers. The story is intensely sad at times, chronicling poverty, neglect, and abuse. But it is also a fantastic comeback story. The Walls children persevere despite their crazy upbringing to make functional, even successful lives for themselves (with the exception of one sibling, about whose future Walls is more vague). Walls never has a woe is me tone, and she manages to find just the right balance between the pockets of humor and the depth and intensity of the family's dysfunction. I don't think Augusten Burroughs, author of the memoir Running With Scissors, achieved this nearly as fully when he awkwardly tried to make abuse into one joke after another.
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