Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls, born April 21, 1960, in Phoenix, Arizona, is an American author and journalist best known for turning the facts of an unstable childhood into the memoir The Glass Castle. Before she became a full-time author, she worked in the brisk, public-facing world of magazine and online journalism, including years as a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com. Her career spans print reporting, New York media in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the early web era, where celebrity and political gossip became part of daily online reading.

Walls was the daughter of Rex Walls and Rose Mary Walls, and grew up with two sisters, Lori and Maureen, and one brother, Brian. Her family life was rootless. They moved from Phoenix to California, including a brief stay in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, then to Battle Mountain, Nevada, and Welch, West Virginia, with periods of homelessness. In Welch, her father’s Appalachian hometown, the family lived in a three-room house without plumbing or heat. At 17, Walls moved to New York to join her sister Lori. With grants, loans, scholarships, and a year answering phones at a Wall Street law firm, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Barnard College, graduating with honors in 1984.

Her first steps in journalism came at a Brooklyn newspaper called The Phoenix, where she interned and later became a full-time reporter. From 1987 to 1993 she wrote the “Intelligencer” column for New York magazine, then wrote a gossip column for Esquire from 1993 to 1998. From 1998 until 2007, when she left to write full-time, she contributed regularly to the MSNBC.com gossip column “Scoop.” She also contributed to USA Today and appeared on The Today Show, CNN, Primetime, and The Colbert Report. Her 2000 book, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, offered a humorous history of gossip in American media, politics, and life.

In 2005, Walls published The Glass Castle, the book that made her work widely familiar to readers. The memoir described the joys and struggles of her childhood and gave readers a close look at her dysfunctional family. It was well received by critics and the public, sold more than 4 million copies, and was translated into 31 languages. As of June 3, 2018, it had spent 421 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The book received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award in 2006, and the Books for Better Living Award. A film adaptation of the same name was released in 2017, with Brie Larson playing Walls.

Walls continued writing fiction rooted in vivid family histories and hard circumstances. In 2009 she published Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, based on the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith; editors of The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of 2009. Her second novel, The Silver Star, appeared in 2013, followed by Hang the Moon in March 2023. For readers of her quotations, Walls’s line, “The most important thing in life is learning how to fall,” carries the plain force of a writer who has made art from instability, work, memory, and survival.