[glass castle]

Glass Castle is a short visual narrative that recounts three selected excerpts from Jeannette Wall’s memoir Glass Castle, which accounts her immensely dysfunctional upbringing and relationship with her parents. Specifically, Jeannette’s father often came up with wildly imaginative and adventurous spins to their impoverished, structureless family reality for Jeannette and her siblings. Jeannette wholeheartedly believed such explanations and interpretations of their lives as a child. In the book she recounts her gradual and aching maturation and realization about the truth of her father’s irresponsibility, abuse, and deceit as she grew up. 

This narrative traces back through three scenes of Jeannette and her father’s relationship, which respectively aim to illustrate her trusting naivete and adoring idolization of her father as a child, to denial of her father’s manipulations, to ultimately disappointment and detachment.  The scenes are presented in reverse order to better capture the more subtle, almost nostalgia of remembering and reminiscing this relationship in adulthood, rather than the heartbreak and anger of experiencing it in real time. There seems to almost be some universal, bittersweet catharsis about how,  after the dusts of pain and trauma have settled and been processed, when revisiting even the most difficult and complex of relationships, we can realize and perhaps still access some moments of joy and warmth. 

Acknowledgements: 

Shelly for visual and conceptual inspiration, 

music: Song for Sienne by Brian Crain from [https://my-free-music.icu/download/brian-crain-song-for-sienna.html]