Here is a memoir, no fiction, which compares well with The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Like Rebecca, Jeannette Walls pulls herself up out of an incredibly filthy, abusive and deprived childhood to become a woman of culture, in this case a journalist.
Her parents are not immigrants but 60’s hippies, a brilliant but erratic engineer with complete architectural plans for a solar- maintained glass mansion, and an artist with no time for homemaking or mothering. The conditions are hard scrabble, first camping in western deserts and then barely housed without plumbing or heat and always, always hungry.
Yet Jeannette and her brother and sister save themselves. . She goes to Barnard College. At the end of their lives, despite efforts by their daughters to house them, her feckless parents choose to be homeless and living out of dumpsters in New York City.
Amazingly Jeannette never totally condemns them. There is humor and loyalty and tolerance for their foolishness throughout her history, an experience that would have destroyed most of us.
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