• Jeannette Walls Father
• Jeannette Walls Books
• John J Taylor Jeannette Walls
• Jeannette Walls Eric Goldberg

Rose Mary Walls. Jeannette's mother. Rose Mary enjoys art and dislikes rules. She frequently withdraws into her own world and is incredibly self-involved, sometimes to the point of placing her children in harm. She calls herself an 'excitement addict' and is most pleased when life is an adventure. Jeannette’s father. The Glass Castle is a 2005 memoir by Jeannette Walls. The book recounts the unconventional, poverty-stricken upbringing Jeannette and her siblings had at the hands of their deeply dysfunctional parents. Walls married Eric Goldberg in 1988; they divorced in 1996. She married fellow New York writer John J. Taylor in 2002, and the couple now.

1. Eric Goldberg (m. 2002) Jeannette Walls (born April 21, 1960) is an American author and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood. Published in 2005, it.
2. Jeannette walls eric goldberg The Rags to Riches Story of Gossip Columnist Jeannette Walls. Eric was Eric Goldberg, a man Jeannette was seeing at the time. He had grown up on Park Avenue and lived there still. So she moved uptown in a big way. In those days of downtown battles between.
3. Eric Goldberg: Eric Goldberg, Jeannette Walls's first husband, is affluent and stable. Professor Fuchs: Professor Fuchs is one of Jeannette Walls's favorite professors at Barnard College. Ernie Goad: Ernie Goad is a kid in Welch, West Virginia, who makes fun of the Walls children. Ginger: Ginger is a prostitute Rex takes up with in Battle.

Journalist and author

Born c. 1960, in Phoenix, AZ; daughter of Rex (an electrician) and Rose Mary (an artist) Walls; married Eric Goldberg, 1988 (divorced, 1996); married John Taylor (a journalist), 2002. Education: Received degree from Barnard College, 1984.

Addresses: Office — MSNBC on the Internet, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052.

Career

Author of the 'Intelligencer' column for New York magazine, 1987-93; gossip writer for Esquire magazine, 1993-98; author of 'Scoop,' a gossip column published four times weekly on MSNBC.-com, 1998—; published first book, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, 2000; published The Glass Castle: A Memoir, 2005.

Sidelights

Reviewers of Jeannette Walls's 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, often mentioned the 'truth is stranger than fiction' aphorism. Walls is part of New York's media elite, the author of a widely read gossip column published four times a week on the Web site MSNBC.com. Imposingly tall and usually described as a style-savvy redhead, she rose to a position of immense power in the celebrity-news-driven culture of the late 1990s. What she had feared for much of her stellar ascent, however, was that another journalist might uncover the real scoop— that she had lived in near-unimaginable poverty in West Virginia as a child, sometimes sharing cat food with her siblings, and that her parents had followed her north when she was in college and then willingly became members of the city's homeless population.

Walls was 17 years old when she joined her older sister in New York in 1977. The family's roots were out West: her mother, Rose Mary, was the daughter of an Arizona cattle rancher, and married an Air Force officer named Rex Walls in 1956. Children Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen followed, but neither parent was enthusiastic about holding down a regular job. The family lived hand-to-mouth, with Rex taking occasional electrician jobs and Rose Mary using her teaching degree for a year before giving it up. Rex talked about a gold-prospecting device he called The Prospector, which never made it past the blueprint stage. Rose Mary preferred painting and drawing over supervising or even providing meals for her children.

The bohemian ideals of Walls' parents, played out in various towns of the Southwest during the 1960s, might be classified as neglect and even abuse by social workers a generation later. At age three, Walls was badly burned when she tried to cook hot dogs by herself on the family stove, and underwent skin graft operations. Later, there were times when there was no food in the house, nor even lunches for them to take to school, but their parents refused to enroll them in a free-lunch program. Sometimes Walls stole food from the lunch sacks of her classmates to stave off hunger. The family usually fled from one town to another to avoid creditors, but Rex would tell the children that the bill collectors were actually government agents. 'We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure,' Walls writes in The Glass House, in which she also recounts one escape when her father tossed the family cat out of the window of a moving car as they departed.

Eventually Walls and her family moved to Rex's hometown of Welch, West Virginia, a hardscrabble hamlet where nearly every household lived below the poverty line. Among a townsfolk full of poor, the Walls family was the poorest. They lived in a three-room shack without running water, and with only sporadic electricity. A hole in the roof went un-mended and grew, Rex's drinking became a problem, and Walls and her siblings sometimes had to scavenge for food. Despite the hardships of her home life, Walls—taught to read at an early age by her mother—excelled in school.

Walls and her older sister began planning their escape from Welch and a home where wooden electrical spools served as their only furniture when they were in their teens. When a pair of documentary filmmakers from New York City visited the town, both she and Lori were interviewed by them; in return, they grilled the New Yorkers about what life was like there. Lori fled first, and Walls dropped out of high school after her junior year in 1977 and got on a bus to join her. They shared an apartment in the South Bronx, which was not a particularly nice neighborhood even then, but the sisters considered it paradise. Despite the dangerous streets, they were thrilled to live in a place that had water, heat, and electricity.

Walls and her sister easily found service-industry jobs, and sent for their brother. Back in West Virginia, Walls had worked on the school newspaper, and when she began high school in New York, her teachers directed her toward an internship at an alternative newspaper. From there she went on to Barnard College, part of the Columbia University system. She graduated in 1984, having financed her degree with some scholarship funds, student loans, and her own earnings. In the interim, the Walls siblings had sent for their youngest sister, Maureen, at which point Rex and Rose Mary decided to move to New York City, too. Dismayed but hopeful that the city would have some sort of positive effect on their free-spirited but ambition-less parents, Walls and her sister tried to help them at first, but Lori was forced to kick them out, and after that they lived in a van. Eventually, they joined the city's burgeoning homeless population.

Walls' story also had a Cinderella element: she began dating someone from moneyed, old-New York family. She eventually moved into the family home, in a plush Park Avenue building, and when they wed in 1988, she did not invite her parents to the ceremony and reception at the elite Harvard Club. By then she was writing the 'Intelligencer' column for New York magazine, which was not technically a gossip column but more of a weekly monitor of Manhattan media, politics, and celebrity cultures. At the time, her parents were living in a 'squat,' or an off-the-books residence in an abandoned building. This was a point when the issue of homelessness was gaining a great deal of media attention, and squatting was in some cases a form of political protest. Rex proved a media-savvy ringleader, and Walls sometimes saw him being interviewed for the local television news.

Walls' husband knew her full story, but no one in her professional life did. She was increasingly successful at her job, and the cutthroat magazine atmosphere did not deter her. 'A couple people lashed out at me,' she recalled in an interview with Jim Windolf for Vanity Fair. 'This woman at New York magazine said, 'You Barnard [graduates] don't know what it's like for the rest of us. You had everything handed to you.'I was flattered. I was like, 'Yes! I pulled it off!' Her secret was nearly made public when a comic-strip writer from the Village Voice called and told her he had interviewed a homeless man who claimed to be her father. She begged him to keep the story quiet, but around this same time she finally confessed to a female colleague at the magazine. That woman later wrote a romance novel about a high-profile Manhattanite, redheaded like Walls, who covers up an impoverished Appalachian past.

The 'Intelligencer' column was read and noticed by many, and Walls had little trouble moving on to a higher-profile job after a few years. She turned down offers from the New York Post and New York Daily News to write a daily gossip column, instead taking a job with Esquire in 1993. Five years later, she moved on to MSNBC.com, where her 'Scoop' column ranks among the leading scandalmongers in a pack that includes syndicated veterans Liz Smith and Cindy Adams, as well as the feared Richard Johnson of New York Post 's 'Page Six' and his New York Daily News counterpart, Lloyd Grove.

Walls' first book was published in 2000. Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, was not a tell-all on the industry, but instead recounted its history in American pop culture over the decades. It also charted the explosive rise of a celebrity-driven media industry over the past decade. Her book did offer one somewhat scandalous assertion: she 'outed' Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report, revealing the sexual orientation of the Internet scribe who first broke the Monica Lewinsky story. In response, Drudge published Walls' home phone number on his site, but Walls said she refused to change the listing and instead answered every call.

Walls' first marriage ended after almost a decade. In 2002, she wed a fellow journalist, John Taylor, who was familiar with the confessional-memoir genre. Three years earlier, Taylor had written an account of his own failed first marriage, Falling: The Story of One Marriage. But Taylor did not know the full story of Walls' upbringing. Finally, on a walk through Central Park one day, Taylor told her, 'I'm tired of this. You're lying to me about something,' Walls recalled in the Vanity Fair interview. 'He's a good journalist. He noticed some holes in my story. And I told him. But I was ashamed. If you have that sort of past, you either exploit it or are ashamed of it, one or the other.'

Taylor encouraged Walls to come clean before someone else beat her to it, and she joked that he duct-taped her to a desk in order to force her to sit down and write her next book. The result was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, which enjoyed tremendous publishing-industry buzz before it appeared in stores. When chapters were sent out to test the waters, editors and reviewers clamored for more, and some admitted to reading the manuscript in one sitting. The title was taken from a fantasy that Walls's father used to spin for her, that one day he would build her a fabulous, solar-powered glass castle in the desert.

Reviews commended Walls' honesty and evenhanded treatment of Rex, who had died of a heart attack in 1994, and Rose Mary, who was 70 years old but still living in an unheated East Village hovel with a multitude of cats. Critiquing it for the New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose asserted that 'Walls has a telling memory for detail and an appealing, unadorned style. And there's something admirable about her refusal to indulge in amateur psychoanalysis, to descend to the jargon of dysfunction or theorizeabout the sources of her parents' behavior.'

Walls was pleased that her candid revelations about her family did not turn out as badly as she expected. During the writing process, 'I kept wondering, 'Who the heck is going to care about this pathetic kid and her wacky family?' she told Publishers Weekly interviewer Bridget Kinsella. 'But the response has just bowled me over.' Even Rose Mary read the book and liked it, though she took issue with a few minor characterizations, such as the fact that Walls wrote that her mother was a terrible driver.

Walls still writes the 'Scoop' column, which continues to break the occasional celebrity-shocker. She was the first to report, for instance, that hackers had cracked the code of the personal digital assistant device belonging to Paris Hilton, and were posting the phone numbers and text messages online. Two of Walls' siblings also fared well as adults: Lori became a successful illustrator, while her brother retired after 20 years as a New York City cop and started college. Their youngest sister, Maureen, lives a less orthodox lifestyle in California. Childless, Walls and her husband enjoy the pinnacle of success for a New York couple: a home in Manhattan, and another in the Long Island resort community of the Hamptons. She still appreciates the small luxuries, she told Entertainment Weekly writer Karen Valby. 'I will never take for granted a thermostat. Every time I turn on the sink it's a miracle. 'Look at all that water gushing out!' I go to the grocery store and I can buy anything I want. I don't have to ask the manager if he has any bruised bananas at a discount.'

Selected writings

Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, William Morrow & Company (New York City), 2000.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Scribner (New York City), 2005.

Sources

Books

Walls, Jeannette, The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Scribner (New York City), 2005.

Periodicals

Entertainment Weekly, March 18, 2005, pp. 32-36.

More March 2005, p. 34.

New York Times Book Review, March 13, 2005, p. 1.

People, April 4, 2005, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, February 7, 2005, p. 20.

Time, March 7, 2005, p. 78.

Vanity Fair, April 2005, p. 184.

Yes. The Glass Castle true story confirms that Rex Walls, who is portrayed by Woody Harrelson in the movie, constantly moved his family every few months to different parts of California and Arizona to avoid debt collectors. It wasn't until Jeannette was seven and her father had a stable job at a mining company that they enjoyed any sense of stability, but it didn't last long. In the first ten years of her life, Jeannette's family moved at least 20 times. -People.com

Fact-checking The Glass Castle revealed that Rex Walls turned to alcoholism after the death of his second daughter, Mary, who was only an infant when she died.

Yes, despite her impoverished and nomadic upbringing, as an adult Jeannette Walls found success as a writer. She started as an internist and then a reporter for the Brooklyn newspaper The Phoenix. She went on to write the 'Intelligencer' column for New York magazine and became a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com. However, she is best known as the author of the memoir on which the movie is based, also titled The Glass Castle. The book, which offers a deeper glimpse into her difficult and nomadic upbringing, was on the New York Times Best Seller list for a total of 261 weeks and has sold six million copies.

According to her memoir, this is what happened. Rex blew through the inheritance from Rose Mary's mom, Grandma Smith. It was then that Rose Mary decided that the family would move yet again, this time to Welch, West Virginia to live with their paternal grandparents (Rex's parents). While there, Jeannette walked in on her grandmother molesting her brother Brian and quickly realized that her father was likely molested as a child too. Jeannette's older sister Lori confronted their grandmother and the altercation turned physical. Instead of defending Lori, Rex reprimanded his daughter but the family was kicked out regardless.

Jeannette Walls Father

Yes. The Glass Castle true story reveals that the rotting home Rex Walls moved his family into indeed had no indoor plumbing or electricity.

Yes. The only money coming in was from odd jobs that Rex found and sporadic checks from an oil company that leased a piece of property their mother Rose Mary owned. To avoid starving, the children turned to dumpster diving.

Not exactly, though he's intended to be a streamlined version of her real-life boyfriend at the time, Eric Goldberg (who she ended up marrying). Born and raised on Park Avenue, Goldberg contradicted her own alcoholic father and impoverished upbringing. In this sense, he correlates to Max Greenfield's wealthy accountant character David in the movie, despite the character being polished with fiction to play up the contrasting worlds.

Yes. Jeannette was trying to cook her own hot dogs on the stovetop when the gas flame caught her dress on fire. Her mother, who was too busy painting to make her lunch, ran in and wrapped her in a blanket. A neighbor drove them to the hospital, where Jeannette was placed on a bed of ice. She remained in the hospital for several days recovering from her burns until her father showed up and took her home against the doctor's wishes. She was soon back to cooking hot dogs by herself.

Yes. Frustrated that she had to force herself to work as a teacher at times, Rose Mary occasionally expressed to her children that life would be far easier if she didn't have to care for them.

Yes. This apparently took place during the summer that she was 13 when her mother had left to take teaching classes. Her father duped her into his scheme. Rex told a pool player at a bar that Jeannette would perform sexual favors. Upset that it was a lie, the older man groped her and tried to rape her. It was after this that Jeannette decided to refuse to partake in any more of her father's schemes and landed her first real job at a jewelry store.

Yes. Jeannette's mom's real paintings were used in the film. She had been nervous people would make fun of her artwork but decided to allow the filmmakers to use them anyway. Some of her paintings are pictured below. -ABC News

In researching The Glass Castle true story, we learned that the real Jeannette Walls moved to New York City after her junior year in high school. She had planned to move to New York for college but decided to leave a year early and complete her senior year there. After graduating, she was able to get an internship at a newspaper. She and her sister Lori encouraged their younger brother Brian to join them in New York after his junior year, which he did. Lori became an illustrator. Brian later became a police officer and eventually a detective.

Yes. With their parents' house in Welch on the verge of being condemned, Lori asked 12-year-old Maureen if she wanted to come to New York to live with them and she accepted. Maureen had been eating and sleeping over at friends' houses since there was no food at home.

Yes. Rose Mary called her daughter Jeannette and told her that she and Rex wanted to be closer to the children and that they were moving to New York City. The move was also likely motivated by the fact that they didn't have anywhere to live. Lori and Brian tried to help them for a while but ultimately had to tell them they couldn't stay in their apartments. Rose Mary and Rex became homeless, squatting in abandoned buildings for a time.

Yes. According to The Glass Castle true story, this is what happened in real life too. Jeannette was on her way to an upscale party and her taxi got stuck in traffic. She looked out the window and saw her homeless mother searching through garbage. During an Oprah Winfrey interview, Jeannette confirmed that, like in the movie, she slid down in her seat and hid from her mother. She was living on Park Avenue at the time.

No. Unlike the movie, the reason that Janet decided to open up and share her story is much more bizarre. She does see her mom dumpster diving in the book, but it's not what prompts her to reveal her secret. In her memoir, she gets a call from a Village Voice cartoonist who tells her that he plans to expose her parents as squatters in his next cartoon. Stressed over being outed, she is comforted by co-worker Kelli Pryor who she shares her entire life story with. Ironically, or not so ironically, Pryor went on to write a romance novel that mimics Jeannette's story, which Jeannette herself turned into a memoir.

Like in The Glass Castle movie, Rex called Jeannette in 1994 and informed her that he was dying. He passed away a week later of a heart attack.

Yes. According to the memoir, Rose Mary Walls saw it as an adventure and refused to accept help from her adult daughters. Eventually, she did accept Jeannette's help after her Manhattan home was destroyed in a fire in 2006. Rose Mary went to live with Jeannette and her husband on their 205-acre farm in Orange, Virginia where they built her a small cottage. -People.com

No. She makes no apologies. 'They had a very interesting life,' says Rose Mary, 83. 'They had experiences nobody else had. So why in the world complain?' -CBS Sunday Morning

Yes. Her 2009 novel Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel is based on the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who overcame poverty growing up on the Texas frontier. She learned how to break horses, eventually became a teacher, and years later ran an expansive cattle ranch in Arizona. She used her ingenuity to discover ways to earn extra money, which included playing poker, racing horses, and selling bootleg liquor. In Jeannette Walls' memoir The Glass Castle, her grandmother is mentioned when Rose Mary inherits her mother's house (and some money) and the family goes to live there, only to see the money evaporate and the house fall into disrepair.

Jeannette Walls Books

Continue learning about The Glass Castle true story by watching the Jeannette Walls interviews below. In the second video, her mother Rose Mary also speaks and shows off some of her paintings.

John J Taylor Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls Eric Goldberg