Author Jeannette Walls takes inspiration from unconventional childhood for new novel, WordFest presents Jeannette Walls at the Calgary Public Library on Tuesday. Tickets and info: wordfest.com. Write what you know: It's an adage that Jeannette Walls took to heart, and it propelled her to the top of the bestseller lists. The Glass Castle - Walls' moving memoir of growing up dirt poor with creatively gifted parents who were unconventional at best, borderline abusive at worst - spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller chart. Now, with The Silver Star, Walls is entering the world of fiction ... sort of.
"I stole heavily from my own life, no question," Walls says over the phone from Austin, Texas, where she's about to give a reading. "I will plead completely guilty to that one. Where else would you get inspiration from, if not real life? Yes, there's the relationship with the flaky mom - who, at the same time, can give gifts. Charlotte is not my mom, but there are a couple of lines of my mother's that ended up in the book." Walls has plenty of real-life drama to draw from. Her family was always on the move, constantly searching for something more than they had, which wasn't much. The four kids were often hungry, clad in worn clothes and bullied for it. Her father, Rex,http://www.jordangrapes5s.biz/, was an alcoholic; her mother, Rose Mary, indifferent to the notion of her children. They were "highly, highly creative," but that brilliance came at a cost: Caring for the kids. The Silver Star tells the story of two sisters, Bean, who is 12, and Liz, a freshman in high school. It's 1970, and the pair lives in Lost Lake, Calif., with their mom ... sort of.
Charlotte is a free spirit who puts more store in pursuing a non-existent career in music than in paying the electric bill or providing a stable home life. When Charlotte takes off after a fight, she mails the girls some money and tells them to look after themselves. The youngsters finally decide to travel to their mother's hometown in Virginia, to see if their uncle and aunt will take them in. Walls' home life was equally turbulent, including time spent in a three-room home with no running water in her father's hometown in West Virginia. Eventually, she moved to New York City while still in high school, to live with her oldest sister. She put herself through Barnard College,http://www.playoffs12s.biz/, launched a high-profile career in journalism and married well,http://www.phoenixsun8s.biz/, living in an apartment on the Upper East Side. But she felt a fraud, afraid that her colleagues and friends would find out that the woman picking through the Dumpster outside the society events Walls attended was her mother. So, at the urging of her second husband, John Taylor, she wrote The Glass Castle.
The 53-year-old has always considered herself a non-fiction writer. As such, she made creative choices, such as tone and perspective, but "there are a number of paths already laid out in one direction or another. "Fiction is an entirely different kettle of fish. It's like navigating on the ocean: you can turn any way. The question I kept asking myself was, 'What happened?' ... What I kept doing, time and time again, rather than making things up or imagining it, was to try to find an example, to make it feel true, to make it feel real." That tangled relationship between mother and child feels all too real in The Silver Star, as does Bean's burden of growing up too fast. "Both in my own life, and talking to so many readers, I am fascinated with what happens when you have a negligent or absent parent in the way the sibling relationships become more intense, more important. ... These children often take on the role of adults so that their siblings can have a childhood. I think that is genuinely heroic when that happens ... But sometimes when the burden is too much, the child cracks." That leads me to a line in The Silver Star.
Bean is reading To Kill a Mockingbird at school. She's not over the moon about Harper Lee's book, but likes the part about Scout and her friends snooping around Boo Radley's house. "That really reminded me of being a kid," Bean reminisces. That line broke my heart. Bean is 12. She's still a kid, but has been robbed of the carefree nature of childhood by the selfish acts of her mother. Was she ever really a child? "No, not completely, but more so than Liz, who was not allowed to be a child," Walls says. "Bean thinks of the world as a simpler place than it is, because Liz has protected her so much." Again,http://www.squadronblues13s.biz/, fiction echoes fact. Walls' eldest sister, Lori, was always dubbed the smart one, just like Liz. And Bean shares a willingness to stand up and fight with Walls. "I can be a little headstrong. I'm 'Let's get it done,'" the author admits, laughing at her own use of "little."
"I got a lot of Bean in me, or Bean has a lot of me in her. I don't know which it is." Something else the two share is the notion that no matter how hard life gets, how horrible the situation you find yourself in becomes, there's nothing to be done but to keep moving forward. "You gotta keep going. You gotta keep fighting, even if you are losing, even if you are the source of ridicule in your town. You don't see how you're going to get out of the situation, but you keep fighting." Walls has, and she made it out. And she brought her mother with her. Rose Mary now lives in a home of her own on the author's farm in Virginia. Again,http://www.bugsbunnys8s.biz/, Walls could be talking about her own life when she talks about her novel. "It's not an entirely happy ending. There is some real damage done, but that's life. That's what happens. But you know, you just keep going."