by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2005, ISBN0-7432-4753-1
Available at Powell's Books

Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4165-8628-9
Available at Powell's Books

Jeanette Walls is the kind of author who makes it difficult to go to sleep at night. It’s hard to turn off the light and set aside the stories about her hardscrabble, far-from-everyday family.

First came The Glass Castle in 2005, a memoir about her impoverished childhood that demonstrates how parents can be dangerously negligent yet brilliantly nurturing at the same time.

Nomadic family life
Extreme resilience and inventiveness helped Walls and her siblings survive their college-educated parents’ nomadic lifestyle and erratic attempts to earn a living. Hunger, lack of indoor heating and running water, dirty clothing and homelessness were regular problems.

Walls has said it took her 20 years to work up the courage to share the story of her childhood, because she feared that friends and journalism colleagues would ostracize the girl who grew up with a garbage pit in her Appalachian backyard.

But The Glass Castle has been a runaway success with staying power on many bestseller lists, including a steady spot on USA Today’s Top-150 list since October 2009.

Readers told Walls that they were particularly fascinated and puzzled by her mother, Rose Mary Walls, who so wanted to be an artist that she wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning to go to work even if there was no food in the house.

Half Broke Horses
So Walls dug deeper into family memories, trying to write a book about her unconventional mother, with whom she has a loving, supportive relationship despite childhood difficulties. She struggled. So Rose Mary suggested writing instead about her mother, the raucous, resourceful westerner, Lily Casey Smith.

A rip-snorting ride of a memoir was born in 2009 and titled Half Broke Horses, A True Life Novel. The book isn't classified as non-fiction, because Walls told Lily’s story in first person and had to draw most of the information from family stories instead of interviews with her grandmother.

Lily died when the author was 8 years old. But in a Barnes and Noble interview, Walls says, “Lily was one of those people who, once you met her, she was seared on your brain…. Everything about Lily was loud: her voice, her clothes, her piano playing. She cussed like a sailor, danced so as to shake the rafters, and was always pulling out her gun or pulling out her false teeth.”

Southwestern adventures
Half Broke Horses begins with Lily’s youthful adventures in the Southwest, ranging from rescuing siblings during a flash flood to journeying through the desert alone on horseback for a month on the way to her first teaching job. It ends as she and her rancher husband ride out the Great Depression through creativity, severe frugality and a pre-dawn-to-dark schedule of hard work.

Along the way, Lily and Big Jim raise two rambunctious children who perfectly fit the old cowboy lyric of  “Don’t fence me in.”

By chance, I read Half Broke Horses before venturing into The Glass Castle. So Grandma Lily’s story informed my outlook on Walls’ scary yet exhilarating childhood. It also cast light on why, unlike Lily, Rose Mary — whose learning disabilities are apparent in Half Broke Horses — dealt poorly with the boundaries of work life as a teacher. It was a profession she was forced into by her pragmatic mother.

But Rosemary was a Bohemian from the get-go and nothing got in her way, especially once she met Rex Walls, an air force pilot, whose drinking and daring behavior covered up the secrets of his crippling, Appalachian childhood.

Surviving the Skedaddle
Extreme flexibility was necessary for the Walls family to survive what the bright but alcoholic Rex referred to as the “skedaddle” — abandoning one tiny town for another whenever bills or other problems piled up.

Despite deprivation, the Walls children experienced an abundance of rich experiences along the way.  When he was sober, Rex tutored them in geology, physics and inventiveness. Rose Mary taught them to view all difficulties as an “incredibly fun adventure.” She fed their imagination with piles of books from the public library. Sometimes the whole family would lounge around reading.

The Walls children inherited their parents’ ability to dream that they might someday earn a living doing something they enjoyed.

Except for the youngest, most fragile one, they also inherited the steel spine and practicality of Grandma Lily, memories of whom no doubt inspired them as teenagers when they ran like the dickens away from the poverty and mean circumstances of their childhood.