When we're astounded by how elaborate and expansive someone's house is, it's not unusual for us to either describe them as "palaces" or "castles."
But while palaces were often the shrines to a monarch's excesses that one might imagine, castles usually had a reason to exist besides sheer audacity. And given the difficulty of penetrating them at the time, that reason was usually to wage medieval wars.
So even at the time, they wouldn't necessarily have been considered pleasant places to live and the more we hear about one woman's experiences with actually living in one, the easier it is to see why.