A chaotic life, put in order in ‘The Glass Castle’

Memoirs, and movies about memoirs, call to mind the axiom of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that “life must be understood backwards, but … it must be lived forwards.”In memoirs, a writer can clean up the messy bits of a life, plot out the patterns of behavior that in the moment one rides like a surfboard on the waves. And in adapting memoirs to film, as with the dysfunctional family drama “The Glass Castle,” there’s a second pass at smoothing