Monthly Book Chat -- The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

Why Read The Glass Menagerie Today?

We would want to read The Glass Menagerie now because its portrait of memory, illusion, economic anxiety, and family tension feels strikingly contemporary. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses poetic, non-realistic staging to show how the Wingfield family—restless Tom, fragile Laura, and nostalgic Amanda—struggle between escape and obligation, hope and heartbreak. In an age shaped by curated identities, financial precarity, and the ongoing pull between loyalty to family and the desire for self-definition, the play’s central questions—how reliable is memory, what illusions protect or imprison us, and what do we owe those we love?—feel as urgent today as they did in 1944.