Literary Lotus

Author Interview: Jeannette Walls

2009-11-10T04:00:00.002-10:00

Looking Inside Herself to Discover a "True-Life" Story

My interview with author Jeannette Walls

Journalists are never the story. They look instead to the world at large, interviewing, researching and seeking objective truth. Jeannette Walls knows this approach well, having worked for twenty years as a journalist in New York City—including a stint as a gossip columnist—before her first nonfiction book, “The Glass Castle,” was released in 2005.

This disarmingly candid memoir quickly became a national bestseller, resurrecting Walls’ peripatetic, peculiar upbringing, her artistic but unconventional mother Rose Mary and creative and savvy but alcoholic father Rex. But in that book, for the first time Walls was very much the story.

Her husband, writer John Taylor, urged her to write “The Glass Castle,” but it was readers who spurred Walls’ newest book, “Half Broke Horses,” unwittingly catalyzing her storytelling ‘s next evolution. This “true-life” narrative is part oral history and part invention, reconstructing her grandmother Lily’s early 20th century Texas ranch life and delivering Walls into the realm of fiction.

“I’m not trying to create a new genre—the book just doesn’t fit into any existing ones,” Walls insists. “Even though it’s just a family story and an oral history, I don’t know if it’s true.”

Lily died when Walls was a child, so she originally intended to write about her mother, Rose Mary, about whose life readers are always curious. “They always ask why someone with my mother’s education would live on the streets the way she did. And when I tell them about her childhood, their faces light up,” Walls said.

But when she attempted writing in her mother’s voice, it just didn’t work. That’s when Rose Mary, who now lives with Walls and her husband in Virginia, urged her to center “Half Broke Horses” on Lily. Walls eventually realized it was the more compelling story.

“I resisted that at first, because I couldn’t interview Lily, but Mom had so many stories so I researched or filled in gaps, and gave it a shot. I wrote it in first person because it was easier to capture her voice.”

And indeed Lily’s voice jumps off the page, that of a tough, no-nonsense pioneer woman who bucks gender role expectations and sees lessons in every event, whether breaking horses, riding 500 miles alone on her pony to arrive at her first school teaching job, being scammed by her first husband, or fired for not adhering to the politically acceptable curriculum.

Today, Walls describes herself as a “what you see is what you get” kind of person, and it’s easy to see the roots of her character in her grandmother’s in depth portrait. She also admits that writing family histories has been a way to see herself, and her kin, more clearly, this time by interviewing her mother daily, hearing startling stories and learning firsthand about Lily’s and Rose Mary’s life philosophies.

“It’s sort of a self-therapy—you’re examining your past yourself,” she said. “The process brought into focus not only Lily’s life but my mother’s. It’s therapeutic and enlightening to look at the patterns that emerge.”

With two books under her wing—the second written in half the time—Walls is on the road promoting “Half Broke Horses,” practicing her new hobby, piano playing, and waiting for the next interesting subject to appear—and not necessarily nonfiction.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a nonfiction writer, but I’m starting to understand for the first time how closely related fiction and nonfiction can be,” Walls said. Her next topic? “I just don’t know. I’m just waiting for readers to suggest one.”

For now, she hopes “Half Broke Horses” will inspire people to look closely at their own histories. “We’re all stronger and more resilient than we realize,” Walls said. “We all come from hardy stock, and if you think about your ancestry you’ll see what you come from. Look inside yourself and find that."

--By CHRISTINE THOMAS

Originally published 11.07.09 in the Miami Herald.

Book Review: Half Broke Horses

2009-11-05T04:00:00.001-10:00

"Grandma lived on a ranch and embraced life: This fictional memoir pays tribute to Lily Casey, a spunky woman born in 1901."

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. Jeannette Walls. Scribner. 270 pages. $25.

Most children resist learning their parents’ lessons, making adulthood at time to ascertain where it all went wrong—or right. Jeannette Walls first mined personal history for answers in her bestselling debut memoir “The Glass Castle,” and continues to excavate her unusual family mores in her new true-life novel “Half Broke Horses.”

This humorous categorization could be seen as a dig at authors who fictionalize aspects of memoirs yet still call them nonfiction, but is overall a smart disclosure that Walls has filled in gaps and invented dialogue throughout this homage to her spunky maternal grandmother Lily Casey. Lily’s distinct, first person narrative voice brings immediacy to Walls’ inclusion of seemingly every moment and memory from 1901, Lily’s birth year, to the year Walls was born, which also positions the novel as a prequel to “The Glass Castle.”

Lily’s early life takes place on a ranch in Salt Draw, Texas, where her father trained carriage horses but couldn’t ride them, having been kicked in the head by one at age three. His lovable idiosyncrasies, like perpetually campaigning for phonetic spelling, energize these parts, while Lily’s mother, who thought work better left to men and with whom Lily doesn’t identify, fades like a wallflower. Lily compensates for her father’s physical handicap, working so hard on the ranch that a brief boarding school stint feels like a vacation, and keeps her eyes on the future. One of the first lessons she learns from her father is that “no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.”

Such practical ambition is arguably Lily’s defining characteristic, and Walls sketches her only in positive light, emphasizing Lily’s resourcefulness, work ethic, and independence. She’s presented as rough around the edges and proud of it, a free-spirited model of self-sufficiency and women’s liberation who is at the same time dedicated to finishing her college degree, and buckles down during hard times to support both her dreams and her family. She anchors a sprawling story that unfolds along the undulating backbone of early American life, through two wars, prohibition, suffrage, the Great Depression, the rise of the automobile, the airplane—complete with canvas cockpits—and city life.

Walls avoids the interior lives of the men in Lily’s life, her husband a supporting cast member and her son a mere extra. The novel is really about women—from Lily’s tragic sister Helen, who dreamed of becoming an actress, to Walls’ mother Rosemary, a firecracker Lily lovingly describes as “a little like a half-broke horse.” The portrait Walls seems most charmed by is that of tough, headstrong women who make their own luck with whatever they possess, learning from mistakes along the way.

Throughout life Lily sees every event as a lesson, and works hard to impart that perspective to Rosemary. “I tried to make her see that everything in life…was a lesson, but it was up to her to figure out what she’d learned,” Lily says; but in this case, Walls is the one figuring them out, just as we are each left to make sense of how those who came before shape who we are now.

--Reviewed by CHRISTINE THOMAS

Originally published in the Miami Herald, 11.3.09

Here We Go Again

2009-11-02T10:47:00.004-10:00

It's November, and you know what that means.

For some it may be a month of preparing to eat a large meal centered on an unfortunate targeted bird, but for the rest of us it's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

You may recall that during the Great MacBook Meltdown of mid November '08, I lost 30,000 words written for NaNoWriMo. Well, I have mourned them long enough, and will reattempt the same book this year--50,000 words by November 31.

It's on--and I'm already a day behind. But, I like being an underdog.