I really enjoyed reading this memoir. The author recounts her life growing up during turbulent times with an abusive farther in a glass house. Her father was a modern architect who embraced modernism while still holding on to his Victorian upbringing. The author struggles with admiring her father and his work and hating his descent into madness. Sander Hall, a building he designed for Univ of Cincinnati that was ultimately destroyed serves as a powerful metaphor for their family life. The book is very well written and will leave a lasting impression. I highly recommend it.

Like Tara Westover’s Educated, my other favorite memoir of the year so far, this one is stuffed full of incident and charts a heroine’s survival through almost unimaginable psychological oppression. The author grew up in a glass house designed by her father, Modernist architect Woodie Garber, outside Cincinnati in the 1960s to 70s. This and Woodie’s other most notable design, Sander Hall, a controversial tower-style dorm at the University of Cincinnati, serve as powerful metaphors for her dysfunctional family life.

The glass house (which I reckon would make a better title for this memoir, but was probably considered too similar to The Glass Castle) was a status symbol to match Woodie’s racecars and wine cellar filled via the Jergens estate sale; it was also a frame for Woodie’s exhibitionism: he walked around the house naked and forbade his three children from closing the bathroom door. He said he wouldn’t allow prudery and wanted his children comfortable with their bodies. Fair enough, but he also photographed them nude to log their development and gave them front and back massages – even after Elizabeth went through puberty.

Woodie is such a fascinating, flawed figure. Elizabeth later likens him to Odysseus, the tragic hero of his own life. Manic depression meant he had periods of great productivity on designs and landscaping for the glass house, but also weeks when he couldn’t get out of bed. He and Elizabeth connected over architecture, like when he helped her make a scale model of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye for a school project, but it was hard for a man born in the 1910s to understand his daughter’s generation, or even his wife’s desire to go back to school and embark on her own career in criminal justice. His standards were impossibly high; he railed at his kids for having no integrity or work ethic.

It’s no wonder the marriage and the father–children relationships fell apart, just like Sander Hall, which after a spate of arson was destroyed in a controlled explosion in 1991. Several of the most memorable memoirs I’ve read this year have focused on the contradictions of a larger-than-life father – Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Rebecca Stott’s In the Days of Rain, and Educated – and that’s a major theme here, too.

Mixed feelings towards a charismatic creative genius who made home life a torment and the way their fractured family kept going afterwards are reasons enough to read this book. But another is just that Garber’s life has been so interesting: she observed the 1968 race riots and had a black boyfriend back when interracial relationships were rare and frowned upon; she was briefly the librarian for the Oceanics School, whose boat was taken hostage in Panama; and she dropped out of mythology studies at Harvard to become an acupuncturist.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this will be a boring tome only for architecture buffs. It’s a masterful memoir for everyone. I especially loved the photographs of the family and of Woodie’s buildings.