Cars and Cardboard Boxes Before The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls was a well-known celebrity gossip columnist before she wrote a memoir about her own childhood. That memoir, The Glass Castle, describes a very different early life from the one she later led.

As a toddler she had to fend for herself. The book mentions her boiling hot dogs and catching her dress on fire. The family sometimes ate only butter for meals. Her father drank away the family's money, and her mother painted; her mother's view was that a meal is gone in an hour but a painting lasts forever. The family slept in cars and cardboard boxes and lived in an unheated shack in West Virginia. Her parents stressed education and self-esteem, and her father drew blueprints for a glass house he planned to build, which gave her a sense of hope.

Walls was ashamed of her childhood and feared the truth would ruin the life she had built. At a party, she saw a homeless woman digging through the trash and realised it was her mother. When Walls asked how she should answer questions about her, her mother told her to tell them the truth. Her mother lived under a bridge for six weeks and called it her home. Walls persuaded her to move in with her. Her mother resisted at first, but later seemed happier than Walls had ever known her.

In 2011 Walls visited homeless shelters and community colleges around the country to speak about her life. In November that year she spoke at a luncheon for the Urban Ministry Center in Charlotte and was interviewed by WFAE. She said she had begun to question whether homelessness is always a choice and now saw it as more complicated. She argued that everyone has something to offer, and that society will always have people on its fringes who should not be ignored. She described hope and self-belief as the greatest gift a child can receive.