The Glass Castle: The author

       Jeannette Walls was born on April 21, 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona to Rex and Rose Walls. In this memoir, the first story from her childhood was in Phoenix, as a young girl she was cooking hot dogs by herself, (at the age of three) and lights her dress on fire, and spreads. Her mother runs to the neighbor who drives them to the emergency room. When the get there she is told she will be okay, Jeannette actually enjoys her stay at the hospital, its quiet. When her family visits she notices a bloody bandage around her brother Brian's head, the parents refuse to take him to the hospital because they believe one child in the hospital is enough. Soon her father and the doctor get in an argument about how to treat Jeannette. (The doctor believes she should stay bandaged, but her father insists the burns need to "breathe") That leads to the father breaking her out, of course without paying the bills. And this single story shows automatically the kind of family she has.