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Charlotte Talks: Best-Selling Memoirist Jeannette Walls On The Real Story Behind 'The Glass Castle'

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir The Glass Castle tells the story of her challenging upbringing. It has now been made into a movie. 

Jeannette Walls overcame extraordinary obstacles to success: her parents. Her loving and well-intentioned father was an alcoholic with outlandish schemes. Her mother, was a free-spirit and artist. Neither was able to hold a job so Walls and her three siblings learned to fend for themselves.

She went on to graduate college with honors and write for leading publications, but the specter of her parents lingered. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, opens with an account of seeing her mother rummaging through a dumpster on the streets of New York as she was on her way to a Park Avenue party.

Jeannette Walls' story has now been turned into a movie by the same name, putting it back on the best-sellers list. Today we revisit Mike Collins' 2009 conversation with Walls, recorded in front of a live audience at Lenoir Rhyne University in Hickory.

Guest

Jeannette Walls - Writer and journalist best-known as the former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of her 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle

Originally aired: November 6, 2009

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Erin Keever is Senior Producer of WFAE's Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins. She has been with the show since joining the station in 2006. She's a native Charlottean.