sophy on life that one can learn much from.One idea is the unimportance of money in correlation to happiness. Jeannette spends much of her childhood in poverty, but for the most part, she and her siblings are happy. Battle Mountain, one of the places she lived, was a poor and desolate town, but she was felt it "the first real home [she] could remember" (80), and content was playing outside, collecting rocks. Rose Mary, Jeannette's mother, even has the potential to make her family rich by selling the land that she had inherited from her mother, but she refuses to sell it on the simple belief that land should stay within the family.
An inspirational theme in the memoir is survival against all odds. By the end, not only does Jeannette manage to escape the rut of her dysfunctional family to New York, but also attend college, with the little public schooling she has (most of her education is taught by her father), become a writer, and relying only on herself and her siblings. At Battle Mountain, the same real home she felt happy in, she was starving. At one point, Jeannette comes home to see Lori eating margarine, Lori claiming that it "tastes just like frosting" when mixed with sugar. Jeannette and her siblings scavenge for food, from eating other children's leftovers to stealing, all without the knowledge of their parents.
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