Naima ENG-276G Compare and Contrast

Two memoirs Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls share the same similarities in their life stories: a bad childhood within an alcoholic father. However, these two writers are separated from each other about their feeling toward their family: Senna has child anger to her broken family while Walls has forgiven her careless parents. This anger leads Senna to write this book that she explored her father’s past within her self-discovery. However, Walls writes about her past by telling about her memories of childhood without seeking self-exploration; instead she shows how forgiveness played an important role in her relationship with her parents. Senna’s was a daughter of bi-racial couple who has very different backgrounds. Her parents divorced when she was a young child. Her troubled past drives her to investigate both sides of her family, particularly her paternal line. She says, “I thought of what was not there, the other half of me, my father’s side, which I knew nothing about” (13). Her father’s background is multiracial and filled with oral stories with unanswered questions. Because of this, she was challenged to discover her father’s origins and to see what they were all about so she would be able to discover her own identity within his lineage. In fact, it was a self-discovery for her with convoluted past that was filled with pain and gaping holes that illuminates her own childhood. Through this process she aims to understand her difficult father, failure marriage of their parents and the reason of her anger toward them. She was trying to find an answer to her questions: can I forgive him for his neglect or for his promises he never kept. Senna’s life was miserable at home until her parents divorced. She found this fault in her father’s