We were parked in front of a strip mall liquor store that was wedged between a lonely laundromat that was open and a travel agency that was closed about five minutes from his beautiful house. It was my car now, a shiny black Dodge Omni, so I was sitting in the driver’s seat, having been handed the keys only the day before. I had been elated, my mother furious. At sixteen, I was now on my second car, having driven the first one—a very cool 1979 VW beetle with a tricked out stereo in place of the back seat—headlong into an unassuming tree halfway to my boyfriend’s house at 6 a.m. I had fallen asleep at the wheel; the night shift at the coffee shop where I illegally picked up extra hours had just ended and instead of going home, I was winding through the country roads to his unsupervised bedroom 45 minutes away. The bruises from where the old clip-style seatbelt clenched across my body were still evident that day as I sat with my father his latest surprise, the VW’s replacement.

My father was very good at surprises. He’d appear out of nowhere and drop a new toy in my lap, or whisk me away for a ride in his boat. One day two years before, he’d picked me up from high school on his big red Harley Davidson Sportster. He was wearing a helmet, so my classmates didn’t realize it was my father and not a date. I grinned as we pulled away with loud tailpipes. That day he had another surprise: a ride in the cockpit of his newest toy, a Cessna two-seater airplane. I got to take over the controls once we were airborne. I had always wondered why my parents got divorced; my mother just snorted when he showed up with the car and muttered something about overdue child support.

My happiness over the car waned, however, as I settled in for the weekend at his home with my stepmother and two half-brothers. Something was off this time. The boys were subdued and his wife was tense. My father spent the morning in front of the television, yelling at the game with a bottle of beer between his legs while my stepmother banged around in the kitchen. The tension seemed to inexplicably culminate in a very vocal argument about postage stamps. My father grabbed my keys and tossed them towards me. "Come on," he’d said, "Take your dad for a ride." And so we ended up at the liquor store. He complained about his wife, shooting me his disarmingly charming smile that undoubtedly reeled in both my mother and his current wife. Only this time, with his slightly slurred speech, I had an inkling about why that charm faded. He cracked open two cans from the sick-pack with which he’d just emerged from the store, and he handed one to me. "Here," he said, nonchalantly. And at age sixteen, I shared a beer with my dad, and then I drove him home. I was no angel, and that certainly wasn’t my first sip of alcohol, but I knew damn well that good dads didn’t encourage their teenagers to drink and drive. With that realization, the cracks in my father’s glass castle began.

I suppose most of us have encountered someone like that throughout our lives; certainly, Jeannette Walls’s first book, a memoir, was well received. Although first published two years ago, The Glass Castle stills claims its spot on the paperback bestseller’s list. Walls is a journalist with an unorthodox upbringing. Her book details her family’s experiences as she and her siblings followed the whims of their parents, traveling across the United States and living without rules.

Walls’s parents were odd but fun at first. She loved their desert homes: trailers, run-down apartments, or just sleeping under the stars. The soles of her feet were hard shells from running barefoot across the hot sand. Like any child, she reveled in the lawless freedom her parents embraced, even when the consequences landed her in the hospital with terrible burns. Her father, especially, was a source of pleasure for Walls. She was his "mountain goat," and he rained his wisdom and surprises on her when she least expected them. He was filled with promises and sleight of hand, and he would charm her with a gift of a star in the sky when he had spent every penny of her birthday gift on booze or a get-rich-quick scheme. His paranoia about authority and government was believable to his children at that age. Besides, their poverty was only temporary. Their brilliant engineer father had the plans for their future dream house almost complete. The castle made entirely of glass would soon be theirs.

Unfortunately, as Walls and her sisters and brother grow older, they begin to question the value of sleeping in cardboard boxes and wearing threadbare clothing. How could that kind of sacrifice make them superior to their warm classmates? As the family drifts to West Virginia and truly settles into absolute penury, the strain becomes too much for their family. Slowly, they splinter apart. Walls’s journey from there to emotional and physical health is an astounding example of self-sufficiency.

A college professor once asked Walls, then a student at a private school, what she thought homelessness was the result of: "misguided entitlement plans" or "cuts in social-service programs." Neither, she answered. "Maybe sometimes people get the lives they want." The answer infuriated the professor, who, in her passionate defense of the poor, overlooked the possibility that perhaps Walls did know the answer from personal experience. Like many of us, she assumed that the successful students around her shared her own middle class experiences.

Like Walls, I am sometimes ashamed of my shame. It’s difficult to recount how far down my father drifted following that afternoon in the car. Jail, joblessness, addiction. There were other, much scarier memories that came later. But, like Walls’s story, that downward spiral began with a grinning, spinning, charming man with big plans. The first little crack is sometimes the most significant.

Readers who enjoyed the stories in A Million Little Pieces or A Child Called It will love the dramatic contrast of Walls’s life growing up to what we think is normal. The secrecy she’s kept about her life and her parents’ homelessness will challenge what we think we know about class, education, and success.