Author shares secrets of childhood poverty

from the Muskegon Chronicle

By Susan Harrison Wolffis

or years, Jeannette Walls carried a secret, buried deep in her heart, hidden from view.

To the outside world, she was a highly successful journalist who wrote for the New York Magazine, Esquire and USA Today. She had her own column on MSNBC.com and was a regular guest on The Today Show, CNN and PrimeTimeLive.

Tall, elegant, television thin, she was a striking figure, someone who stood out from the rest of the Park Avenue crowd where she lived and worked in New York City.

But she had a secret she didn't dare tell.

Walls grew up mired in abject poverty, always hungry, her family usually a half-step ahead of the bill collectors -- and if they did have a roof over their collective heads, the house never had running water, a working bathroom or heat.

"I had no doubt that I'd be fired from my job, lose what friends I had, lose everything if people found out ... if they knew I was poor white trash," Walls said Thursday night to a capacity crowd of 400 at the Dogwood Center for Performing Arts in Fremont.

Walls, who is the author of the wildly successful book, "The Glass Castle," was the guest speaker at the Fremont Area Community Foundation's Speaker Series.

"I'm just a girl with a story," she told them.

And what a story it is.

"The Glass Castle" has been on The New York Times bestseller list for two years and has sold more than two million copies. It's been translated into 16 languages and is being made into a film by Paramount.

"It stuns me," she said. "I'm overwhelmed."

Walls managed to escape her home life, make it to college and find a career in journalism in New York City -- but one night, on her way to "a fancy outing," she looked out the window of her limousine and saw a bag lady, rummaging through a trash bin, looking for food or some cast-off treasure.

That bag lady was Walls' mother.

Walls ordered the driver to turn around and return to her Park Avenue apartment before her mother could look up and recognize her.

"The emotion that seized me was shame," Walls said. "Now I realize what a knuckle head I was. ... I think: What kind of monster was I as her daughter?"

Walls' parents had followed her -- and her three siblings -- to New York City years earlier. Even though Walls had offered help, housing, whatever they needed to better their lives, her parents chose to live in an abandoned building and forage for food and possessions by going through other people's trash.

That night in the taxi, Walls' secret was too heavy a burden to carry alone. She told her future husband, John Taylor, who urged her first to talk about her past, then to write about it.

"He completely pulled this story from me," she said in an interview before the speech.

One day, Walls met with her mother in a coffee shop and broached the subject of writing a book. She asked her mom what she should do; what she should write.

"Tell the truth," her mother said.

The hypocrisy of the conversation wasn't lost on her, Walls said. In plain language, she was an on-air gossip columnist for MSNBC, plus she wrote a column called "Scoop" for eight years. In 2000, she wrote "Dish," a book about celebrity gossip.

There she was, she said, "digging up stuff on Lindsay Lohan and I was hiding," she said. "I felt like a fraud."

As she started to write her story, not as fiction as she first attempted, but as a "story about a girl believing her dad," Walls came face to face with the cruelest piece of her past.

"Isolation of shame," she said. "If you keep secrets, they haunt you, but if you get them out, they're just something that happened."

Walls spoke Thursday night without notes, speaking at what can only be described as warp speed, slipping in and out of the West Virginia accent of her youth and the affected Park Avenue tone of her young adulthood -- and somehow finding humor in the most harrowing details of her childhood.

"sometimes truth is much more complicated than fiction," she said.

Walls has been on a nonstop speaking tour since "Glass Castle" was published in 2005. Last year, she had 91 speaking engagements. Her speech in Fremont was her 27th and final appearance of 2008, she said. She is headed home to northern Virginia where she and her husband -- and her mother -- now live.

Everywhere she goes, people urge her to write more about her adult years, more about how she ended up at Barnard College and working in television in New York City. During an interview Thursday, she confessed she'd written several chapters on her adulthood for "The Glass Castle" but they'd "fallen flat."

"There's no more to tell," she said.

Walls was inspired to start her new writing project when members of a book club told her they "understood her father," a brilliant alcoholic who "bequeathed" his children their own stars in the sky as Christmas presents when he had no money for gifts.

He promised his daughter that one day he'd build her a glass castle in the desert where they would live -- hence the name of the book, even if "alcoholism and other things got in the way of it being built," Walls said.

"But we don't understand your mother at all," the book club members told Walls.

When Walls was growing up, her mother would rather paint or read than find something for her children to eat. In one especially startling incident, Walls wrote about a time she and her siblings hadn't had anything to eat for several days -- and discovered their mother was eating chocolate candy bars she'd hidden from them.

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