Brutally beautiful. Intimate and infuriating. I finally got around to reading this one, long after it was in all the summer reading lists, and it makes sense why it'd be there, and why some of the content would make some sensitive parents mad. (Oh lord, am I sounding a bit like Rose Mary here?)

The memoir does "take a hot minute" to arrive at the stakes. We roll through exposition and recollection of childhood, taking our time, picking up artifacts and memories much in the way young Jeannette pieced through her rock collections in the desert. My one professor once compared this experience, in the writing process, to trying to find the heat on a finicky electric stove, hovering your hand over the coils to see if it was really warming up and where it was really going. For a good portion, listening to the audiobook, I was left to wonder where the stakes were, if there will be any frisson between the family. In my "cinematically-inclined" expectations, I was anticipating someone to burst out of that often-terrifying environment, never to return. But life isn't that dramatic. The turn to "life beyond this wild childhood" happens slowly and all at once, and then you can't put it down. The prose assumes a childlike stance for the first half, observing in intricate detail their life of wanderings and poverty, and as we move towards adulthood, Rex and Rose Mary Walls become more complex, more nuanced figures, though all the more frustrating.

To someone who grew up with all the bells and whistles and privileges in the world, it's a maddening narrative, and one I needed. And quite simply, it's just damn beautiful writing.