The Glass Castle

From the text:

SOME PEOPLE LIKED to make fun of Battle Mountain. A big newspaper out east once held a contest to find the ugliest, most forlorn, most godforsaken town in the whole country, and it declared Battle Mountain the winner. The people who lived there didn't hold it in much regard, either. They'd point to the big yellow­and­red sign way up on a pole at the Shell station—the one with the burned­out S—and say with a sort of perverse pride. "Yep, that's where we live: hell!"