Literary Birthday – 21 April – Jeannette Walls

Happy Birthday, Jeannette Walls, born on 21 April 1960.

Jeannette Walls Quotes

1. Everything in life is grey, you know.
2. My advice to anyone is to figure out what you’re good at – what it is that you love doing the most in life – and figure out a way to make a living from it.
3. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it.
4. Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.
5. I find books that have a moral and spiritual centre, that speak to what is really important and lasting, hugely appealing.
6. Teaching is a calling too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy – angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.
7. I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m.
8. Some people who’ve read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that’s the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.
9. If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.
10. Memoir is about handing over your life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.

Jeannette Walls is an American writer and journalist. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York for twenty-five years, writing for New York Magazine, Esquire, and MSNBC. She is the author of The Glass Castle: A Memoir, which stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 100 weeks. She published her first novel, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel in 2009. Walls’ second novel The Silver Star was published in 2013, and her third novel, Hang the Moon, was published in 2023.

Source for Image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeannette_walls_2009.jpg