About the Author

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Author Biography

Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1960 to Rex and Rose Marie Walls. Jeannette Walls is a popular gossip columnist for magazines such as New York, USA Today and Esquire, and MSNBC.com. She is the author of two books: Dish: The Inside Story of the World of Gossip and The Glass Castle: A Memoir.

In The Glass Castle: A Memoir Walls applies her fascination with people's lives to herself, revealing her own painful, deprived childhood and a life she once viewed as a shameful secret. Told from Walls' point of view as a child, the book describes her alcoholic father and artist mother, parents who seemed more intent on their next adventure than on providing basic necessities for their children.

At the age of three, Walls caught her dress on fire while attempting to cook a hotdog because her mother was too busy painting to fix her a meal. When she was ten, Jeannette and her family ended up in Welch, Virginia, the small mining town where Walls' father grew up, the children could add their grandmother's abuse to their list of hardships. At age seventeen, Walls finally escaped to New York City with her older sister, and the two struggled to support themselves with jobs in the service industry while living in an apartment in the South Bronx. Eventually, Walls graduated from Columbia University’s Barnard College in 1984, a degree paid for with scholarships, loans, and her own hard-earned money, then went on to a career in journalism.

The Glass Castle has received the 2005 Elle Readers Prize and the 2006 American Library Association Alex Award.

Jeannette Walls currently resides in New York and Virginia with her writer husband John Taylor.