NOTABLE WOMEN: Jeannette Walls

By Ruby Setara

Perhaps you know her from her award-winning book, The Glass Castle, or overheard one of her turbulent personal stories: like getting pimped out by her father, petting a cheetah at the zoo, or even digging through school trash cans for a tasty lunch. Jeannette Walls is a young woman who has overcome a tumultuous, difficult childhood to become an award-winning author, a sensational gossip columnist, and a role model for young women and aspiring journalists alike.

Contrary to where Walls ended up, her story doesn’t begin with an orderly Park Avenue private school, and doting parents; it begins with the three-year old Walls severely burning herself while—without parental supervision—cooking hot dogs.

Although her parents then take Walls to an emergency room, their belief that doctors were “money-hogs” trumped their concern for Walls’s high-degree burns. So in Indiana-Jones-style, they help her secretly escape from her hospital bed; spending that night hiding in a local desert. From this moment on, as Jeannette recalls, the Walls family would continue doing, as her father, Rex, called it, “the skedaddle.”

Judging by how Walls portrays them in her autobiography, her parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, were die-hard nonconformists. They had a complete laissez–faire approach to raising their children, (an approach which allowed young Walls to pet a cheetah at the zoo despite the protests of several zookeepers). They also rejected expected modern familial norms. For example, they preferred to live on the streets with their family and almost scavenge for their food, as opposed to adopting the usual middle-class routine of regular jobs and rent payments.

Moreover, they rejected any formal education for their children. (Especially Rex, her father, who believed that a real education came from simply living in the real world instead of reading textbooks.)

These elements in Walls’s upbringing motivated her to seek a better life — one that wasn’t bound by her mother’s erratic parenting, her father’s alcoholism, or West Virginia’s rural decay.

In 1977, after dropping out of high school in West Virginia during her junior year, Walls moved to New York City with her older sister Lori, and finished high school. The move was an attempt to escape her abysmal living conditions, while also moving to a city where her different interests and aspirations were appreciated, not gagged into silence. While in New York, Walls worked for an indie newspaper company to bolster her passion for journalism, before becoming a student at Barnard College in 1980.

Walls’s career took flight after she began writing an Intelligencer column; she then turned down a number of job offers from the New York Daily News and the New York Post before writing gossip for Esquire, and, eventually doing a gossip column (”The Scoop”) for MSNBC.com. Walls’s stint with MSNBC proved to be the pinnacle of her career. She became best known for outing Matt Drudge (a political commentator), and unearthing several major celebrity scandals. Her book, Dish: The Inside Story of the World of Gossip became a top seller, yet, it did not outsell her autobiography, The Glass Castle.

The latter book remained on the New York Times’ Bestseller list for seven years, which, if this were even possible, further solidified Walls’s name in the hearts and minds of America’s pop journalism community.

Jeannette Walls became a pivotal figure in journalism during her 25 years in the gossip industry. She emerged as a woman with power in a decade where the ranks of investigative journalists and exposé reporters offered little gender diversity. Women were often the target of scandalous, and sometimes career-ending, gossip spun into credible slander by powerful male journalists. Walls challenged the implicit gender bias involved in such reporting by becoming a dominant force as a female reporter in this controversial industry.