Given her background, writer Jeanette Walls would make for a most unlikely gossip columnist. The 50-something writer had an itinerant childhood, moving rapidly from place to place with her brilliant-but-troubled father, an artist mother, and her other siblings in tow. Eventually settling in her father's hometown in rural West Virginia, Walls grew up without a TV and almost no access to films. Instead, the family read voraciously, and were encouraged to follow their own muses. It was only when she came to New York for college and got into journalism that she ended up writing for New York magazine, and thus began an unlikely 30-year odyssey writing about the rich and famous, from a woman who grew up as far away from such pretensions as could be imagined. Her colorful, difficult childhood was immortalized in her 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, which has just been made into a film starring Brie Larson as Walls; Naomi Watts as her mother, Rose Mary; and Woody Harrelson as her brilliant but damaged father, Rex. From the luxe comfort of the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia -- more irony! -- the author spoke with us about her strange journey.
Q. Given your background, you would seem a very unlikely person to make your bones as a celebrity gossip columnist. How did that happen?
A. I went to college, I was an urban studies major, concentration political science, I wanted to write important articles about important issues. I went to New York magazine, I wrote a couple of articles about poverty, including one on the need for workfare, and my editor said, "These are really boring." This column called "Intelligencer" became available. It was a really hard column because it was about movers and shakers. The stuff that we wrote was very litigious. You were always getting yelled at. I was kind of hurt that they wanted me to try that, but nobody else wanted it, so I took it for a while to see how it went. I kinda loved it. All these powerful people were threatening to beat me up, and sue me, but I had the facts on my side.
Q. But you grew up without access to any of these people and their various issues, right? How did you approach the material?
A. So, I had to do a little bit of a crash course: I didn't know who most of these people were, and I didn't care about who's dating whom. In a way, I think that made me more fearless. I didn't adore these people, wasn't intimidated by them. On the other hand, it started feeling kind of wrong, it was inane and kinda stupid. Maybe because I didn't adore celebrities, or wasn't fascinated by them. They're really nice people, but they're just people. That's all they are. They've got kids they worry about and careers they worry about. Meryl Streep told me one time, "We're not that interesting." They didn't do anything other than pretend to be other people, so why are we so obsessed with them? I think they play the same roles in modern society that Greek gods used to. They're these cultural touchstones, and these cautionary tales. People really look at them as more than human, almost immortal, almost larger than life, and they give some people meaning. I genuinely feel sorry for celebrities because they've got no privacy. It's a terrible burden to put on people who are often very young.
Q. It's got to be very alienating.
A. I genuinely liked a lot of them when I met them. Because I do think that celebrities tend be highly sensitive people: They pick up on everything. You meet them and so often they're so much smaller than you expect. I got to the point where I kind of want to protect them a little and that's not my job. What was my job? To make them glorious, like people kind of wanted, or to tear them down, like people also kind of wanted. That's why I compare them to Greek gods: Even though they're larger than life, they're so deeply flawed. It's too much to put on anybody, but especially them. They're porous. They absorb their surroundings more than most people.
Q. With your book, and other memoirs we can classify as "Oddball Parents Forcing Their Children Into Interesting Lives" -- I'm thinking Tobias Wolff, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, etc. -- there's really a subgenre at work. Were you consciously aware of these books while you were writing about your own experience?
A. I think it's really important when you sit down to write one to not look at how other people did. When I first sat down to write it, I, at one point, was reading Angela's Ashes. And I read back a passage I was working on and this "blarney" slipped in. I don't talk like that, you know? I was trying to do the cadence. And the same with Mary Karr: All of a sudden my sentences got really long and complicated. I don't talk like that either. So, I think it's very important to pull yourself back from all of that. It's your story. Put on blinders if you must, but find your voice.
Q. How utterly strange is it to see your life re-created and put on the big screen in front of a huge audience? Were there moments that seemed particularly accurate?
A. Oh, my gosh. There was one scene, it was kind of minor, and I don't know why, but it almost knocked me out of my chair: Where [Woody Harrelson] plucks the door out of the door frame, and he's just so jaunty about it 'cause he's kind of proud. He's got that sort of look in the eyes, the way he flicks his wrist. It's everything. He either knew somebody like that, or created somebody like that, 'cause he got it. That's one of the reasons I'm grateful for the movie: I think that in some ways he brings the character to life more than my book did. I was describing last night, I can't do Dad's walk, and Woody just wanted something really basic, but from wherever he grabbed it in the cosmos, he got it right.
Q. You didn't write the screenplay or make the film. Was it difficult to put your childhood in someone else's hands?
A. I talked to [director] Destin [Daniel Cretton] so much and emailed him so much. Somebody described Destin to me as "God's little brother." He kinda is, he's just scary smart, and so empathetic. The actors kept on telling me they'd never worked with a director who was so clear about what he wanted and his vision for the movie. He did turn to me a lot with questions, but even from his questions, you could tell, he gets it.
Q. Your father is such a complicated figure, and your parents did so many things that could be called out as dangerous if not abusive, yet there's still a warmth and sense of excitement in many of these scenes. Does that feel right?
A. One time, a book club was attacking my mother and father, saying how horrible they were, and one member of the book club was voraciously defending them. She was raised on 5th Avenue and she said, "If my dad had one time taken us kids out and discussed the stars with us. Or, if my mother had one time said, 'Don't worry what other people think of you, be yourself.' I would not be in therapy right now."
MovieStyle on 08/25/2017