Plain Speaking: Q&A With Author Jeannette Walls

The author follows up her saga about family (down but not out) with a chronicle of her Arizona grandmother (gone but not forgotten).

Just before The Glass Castle came out, Jeannette Walls remembers thinking, My story is terrifying. Nobody’s going to get it. But the public “got” the mesmerizing tale of her hardscrabble childhood: It sold more than 2.5 million copies and was translated into 24 languages. Today her memoir is a staple of college and high school reading lists.

“I think I underestimated readers’ intelligence, compassion, and empathy,” says Walls, 49, who lives in rural Culpeper, Virginia, with her husband, the writer John Taylor. “A lot of us carry around secrets, and shame is a very isolating emotion. People just want to know about other people.” Her new book, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel (Scribner, $26), introduces Lily Casey Smith, her tough-minded maternal grandmother. Born in a mud dugout in gritty West Texas, barely educated, Lily taught school, drove cars, flew planes, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband. One of her two children was Walls’s mother, Rosemary.

Q. Lily died in 1968, at age 67, when you were eight. Yet you’ve written the book in her voice. Explain.
A. I slipped easily into Lily’s voice. I was comfortable with her. I call the book fiction because I had to fill in some details on my own, and I didn’t think it’d be honest to call it nonfiction. But this is my granny’s story, as my mother told it to me, as I inherited it.

Q. Did you consider writing your mother’s story first, before your grandmother’s?
A.For a year, every day for an hour, I interviewed my mother, and she kept saying, “You should write about my mother. She’s the one with the interesting life.”

Q. Lily survived catastrophic floods, broke horses when she was five, became a bush pilot. Is the wisdom in the book—“Ten cents adds up,” “If you could convince a horse you’d protect him, he’d do anything for you”—from Lily?
A. That’s Lily. Everything was a life lesson for her. Everything was, Learn from your mistakes. And don’t make them again. In every bad experience, there’s an incredibly valuable turning point.

Q. Your mother is 75. How was her recall?
A. Astonishing! When she told me about the language of the Havasupai [a Native American tribe who live in the shadow of the Grand Canyon], I thought, There is no way she could remember that. This is a woman who can’t remember her Social Security number. But when I went back and checked, sure enough, she’d nailed it.

Q. Famously independent, she now lives with you. How did that happen?
A. It wasn’t easy. She would have preferred to stay homeless in New York, even in her 70s. But when I told her I needed help with my horses, she was here in a shot.

Q. Has she read the new book?
A. She didn’t want to at first. She said, “What if I don’t like it? I’d have to leave you, and I have heat and hot water here.” But she’s reading it now, and every so often she’ll look up and say, “Oh, this is very nice. You have a nice writing style.”

Q. Do you read reviews of your books?
A. I’m fascinated by what other people have to say. That’s why I love talking to my readers. Someone commented, “If my mother or father had just once said to me, as yours said to you, ‘Don’t worry about what other people think of you,’ my life would be totally different.” That’s what memoir writing is all about: This is my life. Maybe you can learn something from it, without the nasty business of actually having lived it.