Jeannette Walls - Career

Career

Walls has written for New York magazine (the "Intelligencer" column 1987-1993), Esquire (1993–1998), USA Today, and has appeared on The Today Show, CNN, Primetime, and The Colbert Report. Early in her career she interned at a local Brooklyn newspaper called The Phoenix and eventually became a full-time reporter there, although the newspaper went out of business in 1998. She contributed regularly to the gossip column "Scoop" at MSNBC.com from 1998 until her departure to write full-time in 2007.

In Walls' 2000 book, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip,she writes a well-researched, witty history of the role gossip has played in U.S. media, politics and life.. In Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, Walls incidentally outed conservative cyber-gossip Matt Drudge as gay.

In 2005, Walls published the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, which Paramount had bought the rights to, although never developed into film. Currently, The Glass Castle has sold over 2.5 million copies and has been translated into 22 languages. It has received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association's Alex Award (2006), and the Books for Better Living Award.

In 2009, Walls published her first fiction book, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, based on the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.

Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir The Glass Castle, details the joys and struggles of her childhood. It offers a look into her life and that of her highly charismatic yet frequently dysfunctional family. Walls’ first memoir and second non-fiction work, The Glass Castle was received well by critics and the public.

• The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner. March 2005. ISBN 0-7432-4753-1.
• Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. New York: Scribner. October 2009. ISBN 1-4165-8628-8.
• Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. New York: Avon Books, Inc., an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. March 2000. ISBN 0-380-97821-0.