Jeanette Walls cobbles together stories overheard in the grocery store lineup
Jeannette Walls continues to draw inspiration from wild dysfunctional past
Amidst the sort-of-recent boom in literary memoirs Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle looms large. Her tale of growing up in a wildly dysfunctional family continues to resonate with readers lasting six years (and counting) on the New York Times bestseller list. She says the overwhelming success of the memoir has been a gift.
“I think everything is both a blessing and a curse” she says. “I didn’t expect people to get it. I could have been paralyzed by its success but just said ‘What’s next?’”
Fans of that book (and its half-fictionalized followup Half Broke Horses ) will find a lot to like in her new novel The Silver Star (Scribner 288 pp.) which mines a lot of the same territory as her acclaimed memoir. Though Star is a work of fiction Walls says the connections to her past are obvious.
“You write what you know” she says. “I write about dysfunctional families. This novel is bona fide fiction but most everything in it I stole borrowed or heard in line at the grocery store. Cobbling it together is the real challenge.”
She says the same details she explored in Glass — children in peril relationships between siblings adults who abdicate their roles as parents — continue to fascinate her.
“Fact isn’t stranger than fiction but it’s more nuanced. The goal is still the same however — it has to feel believable and real.”
The Silver Star follows the travails and triumphs of the Holladay sisters 12-year-old Bean and 15-year-old Liz. They’re plucky heroines (much like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird ) trying to survive a rocky childhood with their crazy often cruel mother Charlotte. Times are tough but the girls have grown to believe that their tumultuous childhood is more adventurous than troublesome. (Much like the Walls children in The Glass Castle .) Hoping to pursue foggy dreams of a music career Charlotte ditches the girls in their Southern California home and takes to the road. After a few days the two realize she’s not coming back.
They hop on a bus landing in small-town Byler Virginia home of dear old uncle Tinsley. The grizzled widower begrudgingly offers them shelter and of course grows to love them dearly. Life resumes with family dinners and enrolment at school. It’s 1970 so the Vietnam War is in full swing and the civil rights movement is fighting to end racial segregation. The girls even learn about their father Charlie who died shortly after they were born.
It’s the kind of story that needs a villain and Walls creates a monstrous one in Jerry Maddox a foreman at the local mill. He hires Bean and Liz as itinerant accountants/babysitters (his wife is working on birthing baby four or five) and they slowly become confidants. Maddox is a towering bully abusive and thoroughly unlikable. One evening he decides to take his rage out on Liz and the horrible incident opens a schism in both their family and the entire town.
Walls says she has no plans for another memoir having covered everything in The Glass Castle . “I don’t have any more wacky relatives to exploit” she laughs.
She still isn’t sure why memoirs are continuing to enjoy such huge success. “They get a bad rap — people think we’re exhibitionists but I don’t agree. I think that if someone is willing and able to talk about themselves candidly and people can learn from it… that’s a gift.
“But don’t believe everything I say” she adds. “I said I’d never write another book after Glass and that I wouldn’t write another one after Horses . You never know what life is going to bring.”
