DeParle's article "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'" Response

Although Deparle suggests in his article "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'" that marriage seem to bring more fortune, in both income and creating family and home for the children than single-parent does, but Jeannette Walls in her autobiography titled The Glass Castle proved that it is not always the case.

Jeannette Walls, along with her brother and two sisters grew up with both parents. Their family moved from town to town across the U.S., and throughout the journey the Walls' parents had shown little effort in making a stable living for their family. During their nomaden living, there were times when the children had to look through the dumpster for food. This reality of Walls' family does not lift up the expectation that marriage help them stay privilege.

According to DeParle, college-educated Americans are increasingly likely to marry one another, "compounding their growing advantages in pay." The essence in the argument is that raising children with paychecks that come in twos is more likely to lift the family out of poverty than that come in ones. In The Glass Castle, both Walls' parents are college-graduates; Rosemary had a degree in teaching, while Rex experts in math, physics, and engineering. Rex Walls, as Jeannette describes, was an 'entrepreneur;' he lived in his dream and that was passed onto his children, but he was rarely in a sober condition due to his drinking habit. His wife, Rosemary, is an "excitement addict," as Jeannette puts it, and she had huge passion in art and painting, that often she would sit in front of a canvas all day instead of finding a job with her teaching certificate. Rex, with his extraordinary views of life, got in quarrel with many people which put him in disadvantage because he kept losing jobs. He did not allow his children to receive food coupon or any charity that was offered to them, because they were not "poor." The Walls' parents eccentricity prevented them to live in a way normal American family would have had.

Despite the series of unfortunate occurrences that they had to live through, their struggle as a family and Jeannette's experience with her parents did motivated her to succeed. At age 17, Jeannette followed her older sister to New York, and tried to make her own living while she pursued a degree to become a journalist. Winship states in DeParle's article, "You're more likely to rise out of the bottom if you live with two parents, and you're less likely to fall out of the top." In the end, Jeannette and her family settled down in New York. Even though the Walls' parents still lived on their values, but the children had succeeded in their own way without having to live in poverty as they did in the past.