Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls is a writer and journalist. She was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She graduated with honors from Barnard College, the women's college affiliated with Columbia University. She published a bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book is being made into a film by Paramount. ^[1] Walls now lives in northern Virginia. She is married to writer John Taylor.^[1] She has written for New York Magazine, Esquire, and USA Today, and appears regularly on The Today Show, CNN and PrimeTimeLive. After nearly eight years of writing for the "Scoop" at MSNBC.com,^[2] Jeannette Walls left msnbc.com. Her final Scoop column appeared on 2007-07-26. She will be turning her full-time attention to writing books.^[3]

Early life

As revealed in her memoir, Jeannette and her three siblings were raised by nomadic parents; her father, Rex Walls, was an alcoholic and her mother was a schoolteacher-turned-painter. Driven by stubborn nonconformity, her parents roamed America, moving (or "doing the skedaddle," as her father put it) whenever money or food ran out. The family eventually settled in Welch, West Virginia, a small mining town. However, her father’s drinking and her mother’s depression grew worse, and the children became subject to the merciless taunting of the locals. According to Jeannette, she hid in the bathroom during school lunch breaks so nobody would notice she didn't have any lunch to eat. She would later rummage through the bins and eat whatever the other children had thrown away. Eventually her oldest sibling, Lori, moved herself to New York City. And following in her footsteps were Jeannette, her brother Brian, and her younger sister Maureen. In New York she kept various journalism jobs and eventually graduated from Barnard.

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