'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love books about dysfunctional families.
'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.
Family tends to be one of the recurring themes in my fiction.
A lot of my YA novels are about family problems.
The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'
The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.
The books that stuck with me most as a child were 'A Wrinkle In Time', 'Dracula', 'Hatchet', 'Bunnicula', 'White Fang', and this YA/kids' book called 'Nobody's Fault' where a kid drowns one weekend as friends play around a flooded ditch.
I got the idea for 'Throne of Glass' when I was sixteen. Music always inspires my books, and when I was listening to the 'Cinderella' soundtrack, I thought, 'What if Cinderella was actually an assassin who liked getting dressed up all pretty and going to the ball, but then she wouldn't mind kicking butt?'
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.
I never read 'The Cinderella Complex' - I'm too afraid that my name might be in it.