Anyone who’s ever had trouble forgiving their parents for the usual parental shortfalls—for, say, failing to nurture sufficient self-esteem, or for not socking enough money into the college fund—should take a walk with author Jeannette Walls.
At the 205-acre farm she calls home in Orange County, just south of Culpeper, a walk with Walls provides sweeping views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a fetching backdrop for the author’s reflections on the writing life and the rough-hewn childhood recounted in her best-selling memoir, “The Glass Castle.”
In a steady stream of passionate ruminations, Walls is sometimes lighthearted, sometimes solemn. “I see it as both a blessing and a curse,” she remarks of her extraordinary upbringing. With a casual but penetrating gaze and hands that are constantly gesturing to underscore a point, the writer’s genuineness is as palpable as the open air. Husband John Taylor, himself the author of six books, revs up the all-terrain vehicle for a ride up to Mount Sharon, where the breeze is brisk and the scenery becomes even more expansive.
After pulling her lush auburn hair into a ponytail, Walls climbs into the vehicle’s bed, a courtesy that allows guests to ride shotgun and escape getting roughed up. At 5’ 10” and strikingly slim, the 55-year-old is all legs in her Wranglers and boots. Her unpretentious allure is accentuated by an upright posture and sculpted cheekbones, features that make it possible to imagine her modeling clothes on a runway. For now she scrunches into a backward-facing position, takes hold of the rail and braces herself like a person who’s accustomed to bumpy rides.
Back at the couple’s 19th-century abode, a farmhouse they tastefully restored after buying the farm four years ago, the rooms are sunny and spare. A pair of gentle greyhounds lie around on wool rugs. In the spacious kitchen addition, the rustic floors are transplants from nearby Montpelier, once home to President James Madison, where the mansion’s early 20th-century add-ons were being gutted right around the time when Jeannette and John were planning their move to Orange.
Life in this bucolic setting, complete with horses, chickens and what Walls refers to as “the meanest rooster you ever saw,” is a far cry from the author’s past lives—especially the days when she and her three siblings scavenged trashcans for food, slept in cardboard boxes and, together with their brilliant but dysfunctional parents, drifted aimlessly through the desert of the Southwest until ending up in a bleak West Virginia mining town, where they settled into a three-room shack with no electricity or plumbing. Walls’ father often blew the family’s food money on booze, while her mother preferred painting pictures to looking after the children. The author’s portrait of childhood impoverishment is so wretched and heartbreaking that book critics have compared it to the classic worst-of-times scenarios found in the pages of Dickens.
Then there is the 29-year period when Walls lived in New York City, starting in the late ’70s when she was 17. Determined to escape the squalor and instability of their early years, she and her siblings headed north at various times, sharing a tiny apartment and cobbling together a living by working odd jobs. Walls found work at a small newspaper in Brooklyn, where the editor eventually convinced her to earn a college degree. She scraped together enough cash and loans to attend Barnard, majoring in political science then launching a career in journalism that took her from various news desks to the niche of gossip columnist for outlets like Esquire and MSNBC. By the time she was 30, she was donning the latest fashions and living in a luxury apartment on Park Avenue, all while hiding the secret of her “white trash” upbringing from everyone she knew.
Complicating this unusual tale was the nagging presence of the past. In the midst of her trajectory, Walls fought to conceal not just the bygone days of a bedraggled childhood but the shameful elements of her current life: mainly the fact that her parents, who had followed their children to New York, were now living alternately on the city’s streets and as squatters in abandoned buildings.
In television appearances on the “Today” show and “Oprah” in recent years, Walls has addressed the veil of shame and secrecy she hid beneath for decades, even admitting to hypocrisy for exposing celebrity quirks as a gossip writer while keeping a close guard on her own demons.
After finally deciding to make her story known—the promptings of which she is now likewise pleased to disclose—Walls spent five years hammering out the book, a process punctuated by frequent tearful meltdowns. Ultimately the anguish paid off. “The Glass Castle” became an instant sensation when it hit bookstores in 2005, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for seven years and making a big splash abroad as well. The autobiography has been translated into 30 languages, and a movie deal is in the making.
For Walls, coming out about her past was not merely lucrative but liberating. “Secrets are like vampires,” she is fond of saying. “Once you expose them to light, they lose their power over you,” she nods, adding, “The truth shall set you free, you know?”
In recent years, the author has produced two more books, very different from “The Glass Castle” but clearly sprung from the same sensibilities. “Half Broke Horses,” dubbed a “true-life novel,” follows the life of Walls’ maternal grandmother, a tough-as-nails Westerner reminiscent of the legendary Calamity Jane. Walls pieced together the biography from stories recounted by her mother, filling in the missing pieces with her imagination. Last year she published “The Silver Star,” a rich tale set in a small Virginia town during the early ’70s against a backdrop of desegregation and the Vietnam War, struggles that defined the era. The plot centers on two young sisters who are neglected by a narcissistic mother and face grinding challenges, including a sexual assault.
That Walls is drawn to writing survival stories comes as no surprise. Her own saga is riveting because it is both harrowing and suffused with wonder. The more you think about the journey she has traveled, the more Walls becomes a compelling enigma.
She tries not to be. “Ask me anything,” she says matter-of-factly. She is pleased to provide a complete tour of the house, right down to the bathrooms. (She takes nothing for granted here. Flush toilets, the thermostat, a pantry stocked with food—all are a daily source of gratification, she says with a laugh.) She is even willing to let you tour the quaint-looking cottage located a short walk from the farmhouse—the home of the likewise enigmatic Rose Mary Walls, her mother.
But first she’ll tackle the hard questions, the same ones people around the country pose on her speaking tours: How did she ever survive such gut-wrenching deprivation while growing up in a land of plenty? How many years of therapy did she require? And how in the world did she ever forgive her parents?
Calamity and Squalor
“The Glass Castle” begins with Walls’ earliest memory: “I was on fire.” At age 3, she was leaning over a stove and cooking hotdogs while her mother painted pictures in the next room. Suddenly her puffy pink dress went up in flames. A woman in a neighboring trailer heard her screams and rushed her to the hospital, where little Jeannette remained confined for six weeks.
In subsequent years she survived additional near-death calamities, including a few more brushes with fire. Around age 5, she fell from a moving car with her father at the wheel—smoking and drinking beer while careening down a highway.
Walls’ portrait of her wildly eccentric parents makes the memoir rich and also exasperating at times. Rose Mary is a self-proclaimed “excitement addict,” a passionate painter who embraced a laissez-faire philosophy of child-rearing (what cultural observers today might call extreme free-range parenting). “Mom always said that people worried too much about their children. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she said. It immunized your body and soul,” Walls explains in the story.
The larger-than-life Rex Walls, who died in 1994, is more complicated. On one hand, he was charismatic and affectionate, especially with his favorite child, Jeannette, whom he nicknamed Mountain Goat. He fueled his children’s imaginations with mesmerizing bedtime stories and regular ruminations about math and physics and electricity. But at frequent intervals he became dark and brooding, ranting conspiracy theories, hurling obscenities at his wife and disappearing for days to gamble and drink. Even when sober he was a meager provider. He spent his time inventing contraptions he claimed would make the family rich—like the prospector, destined to strike gold. He worked occasional odd jobs but usually got fired for stealing or other shenanigans. The family frequently picked up and moved in the middle of the night so that he could escape trouble—doing what he proudly called “the skedaddle.”
Despite her father’s reckless behavior, Jeannette displayed a steadfast devotion to him. Her innocent, naïve perspective, reminiscent of the callow voice of Scout Finch in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” lends the story an irresistible allure. “Everybody said that Dad was a genius,” she recalls in an early chapter. She later notes, “In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a bit of a drinking situation.”
The story’s parental exploits are at times downright infuriating. There’s the scene in which Rose Mary hoards a chocolate bar from her hungry children and another in which she laments the successful art career she might have enjoyed had she not wasted herself on motherhood. There’s also the scene in which Jeannette and sister Lori, teenagers who had been saving their earnings from babysitting and a host of other jobs, discover that their father has plundered their piggy bank and spent their hard-earned wages on booze.
Then there are the story’s minor figures—the uncouth relatives on Rex’s side, whom the children meet when the family migrates to Welch, his detested hometown in West Virginia. They include his mother, Erma, a drunken, profane hag who abused the children and tried to molest Jeannette’s younger brother, Brian, in what is perhaps the story’s most shocking episode.
The Wondrous and Sublime
But there is far more to this saga than shameless negligence and soul-crushing squalor. What makes it astonishing is the juxtaposition of the sordid and sublime. The author describes the family’s regular explorations of the desert, where they unearthed amazing treasures. At home in their various shacks, they were never lacking in books. They maxed out their borrowing limit at the library, reading everything from fairy tales to classics. (It’s no wonder that Jeannette and her siblings were gifted students in school, despite their transience and the fact that their raggedy clothes made them easy targets for bullies.)
One of Walls’ most wondrous memories is of the Christmas when she was 5. Rex had lost his job, so there was no money to buy the kids the usual modest gifts—a sling shot or bag of marbles to place beneath the tree they’d salvaged off a street. (The family always celebrated the Yuletide a few weeks late in order to take advantage of holiday discards.) So Rex decided to take each of the children into the nighttime desert to pick out a star as a Christmas gift, telling them, “Years from now, when all the junk [other kids] got is broken and long forgotten, you’ll still have your stars.” To this day, says Walls, when she gazes up at the night sky and sees Venus, her chosen star, the effect is magical.
Similarly elevating is the memory of her dad’s romantic dreams of a prosperous future, of the day when he would strike it rich and build his family a magnificent house in the desert—the Glass Castle. “It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase,” she writes. “He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the designs for our rooms.”
Both Venus and the Glass Castle are easily perceived, Walls acknowledges, as the empty promises of a pathetic drunk. For her, however, they are metaphors for hope and resilience—what she ultimately walked away with. “We shape our own stories,” she asserts. “We shape our truths.”
Breaking Free
In the midst of a somber reflection, Walls often stumbles upon some detail that illustrates the absurdity of life, like that fact that her husband, during his privileged youth as the son of a diplomat, enlisted in a pricey Outward Bound expedition in order to gain the experience of “roughing it.” The hilarity of that recollection makes her break out in a raucous, reverberating laugh. If you’re inclined at all to embrace stereotypes, you might detect a touch of hillbilly in its aftershocks—a sort of yuk-yuk that hangs on a bit longer than you expect. But then you realize that Jeannette Walls is a woman who clearly can’t be pegged, one who defies stereotypes.
Debunking stereotypes is, in fact, a keen interest of hers. As an advocate for the poor and homeless, a cause she has embraced as a member of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Orange, she wants people to know that her parents were unique and gifted despite their vagrant lifestyle. (Her father, she now believes, was likely bipolar and self-medicated with alcohol; he was probably abused by his mother. Rose Mary, to this day an irrepressible hoarder, may suffer mental issues of her own.) Walls herself is not what one might expect of a person with an utterly chaotic early life. She’s thankful for the advantages it afforded her—like the hearty immune system she probably acquired from eating out of trash cans. (She hasn’t been sick since the ’80s, she boasts.) She also emerged, somehow, with strong self-esteem and, hence, no real need to seek therapy or grant anyone forgiveness.
Over time she did, however, develop a need to break free of her secrets. The first impetus occurred in an incident recounted in the preface of “The Glass Castle.” The 30-something Jeannette was riding in a cab from her Park Avenue apartment to a dinner party. She was coiffed and well-dressed. Suddenly, while stuck in traffic, she spotted her mother, by then a street dweller, pillaging a dumpster. Jeannette immediately ducked down in her seat, anxious that the wildly unkempt Rose Mary would see her and call out her name.
Another prompting occurred after she met John, then a coworker at New York Magazine, in 1987. “Something about you just doesn’t add up,” he declared as he was getting to know her. After she confided in him about her past, he convinced her to tell the story in a book.
Sisters Lori and Maureen had misgivings at first but eventually supported the endeavor. Brother Brian was supportive from the start. Oddly, Rose Mary was always comfortable with it and today has even accompanied Walls on speaking tours. “Just tell the truth,” she always advised her daughter.
Walls set out to do just that. But deciding what to divulge and what to keep private was a harrowing challenge. Shaping the story to reveal its complex dimensions was another. She would soon discover the wisdom of a favorite line from Oscar Wilde, one that now graces the opening page of “The Silver Star”: “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Resonating
Still widely read and appreciated, “The Glass Castle” occasionally sparks doubts. No one could live this way in America, a person once said to Walls.
That person probably never met her mother. Doing so squelches all doubts. Welcoming visitors at her cottage door, the 80-year-old Rose Mary wears a kerchief and a soiled blue coat. Inside, the smell of cat urine waxes pungent. The rooms are a hoarder’s treasure chest, with endless stacks of books and papers, assorted bric-a-brac and everywhere, her paintings, including a portrait of the late Rex Walls.
The fact that the book resonates with young readers from diverse backgrounds has become the author’s richest reward—better than a Pulitzer, she says. A white student in a depressed Southern town, admitting it was the first book he had ever read cover to cover, declared, “This here is a fine white trash story!” An African-American girl in an underprivileged high school recently told Walls, “Girlfriend, you and I could be sisters!”
Occasionally the book is banned from school curricula because of its profanity and scenes of sexual molestation (though none are terribly graphic). It’s too bad, says the author, because in addressing hard subjects, books let young people know they are not alone in their struggles, a recognition that can have powerful redemptive effects. For kids in more privileged environments, such stories foster the all-important virtue of empathy. “Storytelling should not be the thing of ivory towers,” she opines.
Currently, Walls is hammering out her next novel in the breezy shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is not at liberty to disclose its contents. But one imagines it will convey some not-so-simple truths while debunking a few stereotypes and trumpeting the human spirit’s astonishing resilience.
(October 2015)
