Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls at the 2009 Texas Book Festival.
Born	April 21, 1960 (1960-04-21) Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Occupation	Novelist, columnist
Genres	Non-fiction
Notable work(s)	The Glass Castle, Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls is a writer and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com — and author of The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood, which stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 100 weeks.

Early life and education

Walls was born on April 21, 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona to Rex Walls (deceased 1994), an electrician, and Rose Mary Walls, an artist. As detailed in The Glass Castle, Walls' family life was rootless, with the family shuttling from Phoenix, Arizona, California (including a brief stay in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco), Battle Mountain, Nevada, and Welch, West Virginia, with periods of homelessness. Walls moved to New York at age 17 and graduated in 1984 with honors from Barnard College. Walls is one of four children; she has two sisters and one brother.

Personal life

Walls married Eric Goldberg in 1988 (divorced, 1996) and now lives outside Culpeper, Virginia, with her second husband, journalist John J. Taylor, a former writer for Esquire and the author of The Count and the Confession: A True Murder Mystery, Falling: The Story of One Marriage, and Circus of Ambition: The Culture of Wealth and Power in the Eighties.

Career

Walls has written for New York magazine (the "Intelligencer" column 1987-1993), Esquire (1993–1998), USA Today, and has appeared on The Today Show, CNN, Primetime, and The Colbert Report. Early in her career she interned at a local Brooklyn newspaper called The Phoenix and eventually became a full-time reporter there, although the newspaper went out of business in 1998. She contributed regularly to the gossip column "Scoop" at MSNBC.com from 1998 until her departure to write full-time in 2007.

In 2000, Walls published the book Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip in which she, incidentally, outed conservative cyber-gossip Matt Drudge as gay.

In 2005, Walls published the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, which Paramount had bought the rights to, although never developed it into film. Currently, The Glass Castle has sold over 2.5 million copies and has been translated into 22 languages. It has received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association's Alex Award (2006) and the Books for Better Living Award.

In 2009, Walls published her first fiction book, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, based on the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.

• Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. New York: Avon Books, Inc., an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. March 2000. ISBN 0-380-97821-0. 
• The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner. March 2005. ISBN 0-743-24753-1. 
• Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. New York: Scribner. October 2009. ISBN 1-416-58628-8. 

Siblings

Jeannette Walls is one of four children. She is the second oldest child and was one of three girls. She has two sisters and one brother. Lori Walls and Maureen Walls are her two sisters. Brian Walls was the only brother. For the most part they were all close with each other as they were growing up and are still close to this day, with the exception of Maureen. The family itself is not close with Maureen and they have not been since they were growing up.

• Lori Walls: The oldest sibling of them all reached her dreams of becoming an artist. She has been painting and drawing and is now an illustrator who is living in Manhattan.

• Brian Walls: The only boy of the four children. He as well achieved his dreams of becoming a cop. His goals were met and is now retired from the police force. He is currently attending college to earn his teaching degree. His plans are to become a teacher when he earns his degree.

• Maureen Walls: The youngest of all the siblings. She is the most distant from all of the others. She hit a rough patch and the family is trying to help her out of it.

External links

• Publisher's Biography
• Interview with Leahpeah