Bestselling Memoir The Glass Castle Gets the Big Screen Treatment After 12 Years, and It Looks Fine

By Bobby Finger  |  June 2, 2017 | 4:40pm
Entertainment

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls’s memoir about growing up in (and ultimately escaping from) poverty with two unstable parents and an abusive extended family, is one of those wildly successful bestsellers that you’d expect to be adapted into a movie within two years of its release.

It took a little longer than that—10 year longer, in fact—but the result appears to have been worth the wait. Starring Academy Award-winner Brie Larson and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (reuniting for the first time since their excellent 2013 indie Short Term 12), The Glass Castle looks like a mostly faithful adaptation of Walls’s bestselling memoir (it’s sold nearly 3 million copies), with an A-list cast (including Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts) and a nice late-summer release date that suggests a little more studio confidence than, say, October.

I’m a little worried by how forgiving the trailer is to Walls’s arguably terrible parents (her father was an emotionally abusive alcoholic, and her mother was stubborn and incompetent), but I guess “Wow, her parents were awful” is a tougher sell. We’ll know for sure when The Glass Castle is released this August.

 
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