In the deep end with Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle writer Jeannette Walls talks about the movie version of her difficult life with her father. By
JEANNETTE Walls has to be careful with pronouns. When talking about her former life as a gossip columnist for New York magazine and MSNBC, she uses the first person: “I was a ‘journalist’ in air quotes,” she jokes.
It’s the same when she’s speaking about her best-selling 2005 memoir The Glass Castle, whose child protagonist – Jeannette Walls– was the daughter of a nomadic, often jobless and homeless alcoholic and his painter wife.
The book, described by the New York Times as “an alternately wrenching and exhilarating yarn”, chronicles the harrowing childhood that Walls and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, experienced with their father, Rex, and mother, Rose Mary, wandering from town to town before settling in Rex’s home town of Welch, West Virginia.
Notable episodes of mistreatment by Rex include being thrown into water over her head so that she would learn to swim and being left alone, at the age of 13, with one of her father’s lecherous adult male co-workers.
Then there’s the new movie version of the book, adapted by film-maker Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) and starring three different actresses as Walls at various ages. (Oscar winner Brie Larson plays the teenage and young-adult versions. Woody Harrelson plays Rex, who died in 1994, and Naomi Watts portrays Rose Mary, who now lives with her daughter on a horse farm in Orange, Virginia.)
Walls sometimes switches between “I”, “she” and “they”.
Q: Does watching yourself on screen give you a lens through which you can view your story in a way that’s closer to the way a reader might perceive you – almost like having an out-of-body experience?
A: Yes. I didn’t feel that way watching the other actors. Seeing Woody was bizarre to me, because he captured dad so much. Ditto, Naomi. Seeing Ella Anderson, the middle Jeannette, broke my heart.
Q: Was there a sense of detachment?
A: Exactly. I first tried writing the book from the perspective of an adult looking back. But it was too stilted. So I wrote it from the viewpoint of a child going through these things. Seeing them, these actors, playing me on screen, I Q: For what? A: For the decisions I had to make. Anybody who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, to some degree, has to cut off their family. You remake yourself.
Q: Didn’t you once call yourself pathologically independent?
A: I did. One time, I was carrying two pieces of luggage and my handbag, and my husband (novelist John Taylor) said: “Let me help you with all that.” I said, “I can do it on my own!” He said, “Of course you can, but you don’t have to.” That was such a revelation, because I was so afraid of depending on anybody else.
Q: It’s like he was throwing you in the deep end all over again.
A: Some people think I should be so angry, and that I was abused. I was at a book event one time, and someone said, “As a survivor of child abuse...” I said, “Wait a minute. I don’t see it that way.”
Q: Isn’t it abuse? Some viewers may have a hard time swallowing Brie Larson’s line, when she tells Rex, on his deathbed, that she turned out like him, and she’s glad she did.
A: In some ways, I wish I were more like him. He was so much more brilliant than I am, so much more of a performer, a much better writer. The thing we have in common that I owe to him is a fearlessness, a demon-chasing quality that he actually didn’t have as much as I have.
One pivotal moment in the movie is when the kids gang up on Irma (Rex’s mother, who sexually molested both Brian and Rex), to beat on her head. She was the personification of my father’s demons, but he couldn’t do that himself. It freaked him out that his kids could.
Q: Maureen has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Do you ever blame her condition on her childhood?
A: You inherit a propensity for schizophrenia, and it’s triggered by environmental factors. I’ve talked to Maureen about it a number of times, and she’s said she had imaginary friends back when she was 5 or 6 years old. Q: Has it occurred to you that your parents may also have been mentally ill?
A: Readers who are smarter than I kept saying, “Your father was bipolar”. At first, I resisted that idea, because I thought he was just a drunk. He’d be great when he was sober. I realise now they were probably right. He was never diagnosed. Many alcoholics are trying to self-medicate.
Q: Have you ever seen a therapist?
A: I haven’t. I believe that therapy is storytelling. My husband, who urged me to write the book in the first place, likes to say that the process of writing is the process of thinking.
Q: What did you leave out of your story?
A: Not much. Some Rex drunk scenes. One thing is a scene at Barnard, where I ultimately went to college. A very skinny woman befriended me because she thought I was anorexic.
Q: You do have a complicated relationship with food, or so I’ve read.
A: I’ve never really got the fetishisation of food in the big cities, where they make it into architecture. It’s just food.
Q: Your childhood sounds horrific, yet you seem to have turned out okay. Are you the poster child for alternative parenting?
A: I think I am. I would not recommend it, however. I am one of the happiest and healthiest people I know. The last time I got sick was 1987. One of the biggest differences between myself and my husband is he gets really embarrassed when he has to buy toilet paper. I’m so happy to buy toilet paper. I read somewhere that the secret to happiness is low expectations.
Q: The film ends with Jeannette escaping West Virginia for fame and fortune in New York City. Yet here you are, back in the boondocks of Orange, Virginia.
A: It’s the boomerang effect. I was living on Park Avenue, but that wasn’t who I am. I’m a hick at heart. I’ve got green, rolling hills, horses and chickens. Q: And toilet paper. A: What more could a girl ask for? – The Washington Post
The Glass Castle opens at Ster Kinekor cinemas on September 8.