Author Jeannette Walls at Ball State

Courtesy of Ball State email:

In her former role as the popular gossip columnist for MSNBC, tall and confident Jeannette Walls gave little indication of the extremely poor, nomadic childhood she lived and later chronicled in "The Glass Castle" (Scribner, 2005), this year's freshman common reader at Ball State. The "detailed, appealing and admirable" memoir spent three years on The New York Times bestseller list, and Walls will discuss it and her life since with an audience in Emens Auditorium on Wednesday evening, Sept. 21, beginning at 7:30 pm

Unknown to Walls' colleagues during her ascent to national network prominence was her greatest fear - that a fellow 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 bohemian parents had followed her north when she was a student at Barnard College, willingly becoming members of New York City's homeless population.

"We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure," Walls writes in "The Glass Castle." Instead, the family lived hand-to-mouth, with her father taking occasional electrician jobs and her mother using her teaching degree for a year before giving it up in favor of painting and drawing, a pastime she preferred over supervising or even providing meals for her children.

After earning her degree from Barnard in 1984, Walls went on to pen the "Intelligencer" column for New York magazine and features for Esquire.  She joined MSNBC in 1998. Her first book is "Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip" (William & Morrow, 2000); her latest is "Half Broke Horses" (Scribner, 2009).

She appears at Ball State courtesy of Freshman Connections. The event is free and open to the public.