A Conversation with Jeannette Walls

When Jeannette Walls was a little girl, her mother would say to her "You're just like your grandmother!" 

"I don't think she meant it as a compliment," says Walls in this interview, laughing. 

If you've read "The Glass Castle," the memoir Walls published in 2006, you'll know that Rosemary Walls was not a typical mother. As you might then expect, her mother Lily was not the typical grandmother. 

But the surprise of "Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel" (more on that subtitle in a moment) is that Lily was far from the typical woman of any time period. She grew up with almost nothing, became an itinerant schoolmistress at age 15, and came through adversities that might have put one of her contemporaries in a sanitarium -- yet she retained her humor and courage all the way through her adventure-filled life.

One of my favorite things about this interview is watching Jeannette Walls pick up energy and joy as she talks about her grandmother's character and the process of writing this book. What is a "True-Life Novel?" It could mean everything, or nothing -- to Walls, it means that she took the handful of facts and stories she had about her grandmother and made them into a novel as lively as the best fiction. It's up to the reader to decide if Walls has pioneered a new genre, or simply written a novel. 

But should the latter be true? WHAT a novel! I urge you to watch this interview; I only wish it could have been three times as long.