fiefoe

It could be eccentricity:

Mom's eyes were bright. "I'm such an excitement addict!"
The way she saw it, glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from learning to see the world on their own.
He finished off the beer he was drinking, snipped the can open with his wire cutters, hammered it flat, and nailed it over the hole (in the floor).
(After home intruders): They wouldn't consider closing the doors and windows when we went to sleep.
Dad calmly put his hand between the iron bars of the cage and rested it on the cheetah's neck.. Who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah.
But when Dad got up, he'd act as if all the wreckage didn't exist, and no one discussed it with him. The rest of us had to get used to stepping over broken furniture and shattered glass.

But the part in West Virginia was simple hard to get through:

"You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you," she said... The thought gave her a fit of the giggles.
"(Grandma) asked that you kids don't laugh while you're in her house," Mom said. "It gets on her nerves."
The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic look.
"What was his redeeming quality?" "Hitler loved dogs," Mom said without hesitation.
"Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?" I asked. No one said a thing.
An angle so steep .. if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt.
We called the kitchen the loose-juice room... If we got a shock, we'd announce it to everyone else, sort of like giving a weather report.
As Brian and I watched, the hole for the Glass Castle's foundation slowly filled with garbage.

"The Glass Castle" (Reply)