Poured Over: Jeannette Walls on Hang the Moon

By Jenna Seery / April 4, 2023 at 6:00 am

“We all want the same thing; we want respect and security and to be loved — and that’s what storytelling does, it connects the similarities that we have.”

Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, returns with a novel following feisty Sallie Kincaid as she comes into her own in the upheaval of Prohibition-era Virginia. Walls talks with us about the language of historical fiction, the differences between writing a memoir and a novel, the impact of telling your story and more live at Barnes & Noble Union Square with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer.  

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode)
Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Full Episode Transcript

Barnes & Noble
Barnes and Noble Union Square please give a warm welcome for number one New York Times bestselling author Jeannette Walls and Poured Over producer and host Miwa Messer.

Miwa Messer
Hello New York and hello those of us who are joining us virtually. We are also taping for the Poured Over podcast. So I just want to remind you that we are actually videotaping and we’re audio taping, we’re doing all sorts of great stuff. It is my great good fortune to be on a stage with Jeannette Walls. And also, this is gonna be a really fun conversation. If you gave us a question when you registered on Eventbrite. I have those questions. If you gave us an index card and put questions on it. I have those too. So we will get to them. I promise. I don’t actually hold questions until the end of the show. I like to work them in as we go because it’s way more interesting for all of us. I will say some of you were reading my mind. So just be prepared. There’s a little bit of overlap between you guys and me. But more importantly, Jeanette, I’m so excited to see you Hang the Moon is our new B&N Book Club selection for April. It is very, very good. It is on sale today, we are going spoiler free in this conversation because I had all of the pleasure reading this, and I am not going to ruin it for you. So just want to warn you, if you do want to join the book club discussion, that’s May 2, there are details on bn.com We will be spoiling everything to the rooftops and back. But tonight, we’re going to talk about some different stuff. So this is where I get to ask you how you found your voice.

Jeannette Walls
It took a while. Yeah, it took a while. I’m embarrassed to admit, but I will say that there were 17 versions of this book. It wasn’t until I went into first person present, that it kind of clicked for me, right? I like writing about scrappy, tough girls. And as you kind of write you write what you know, right? So it was also very important for me to be authentic and to try to get my head inside somebody who lived 100 years ago, was a challenge. I think that often we read historical books, and they sound very contemporary, or they sound very stilted.

Ye olde the timey language?

And I really wanted to avoid that, right. And there was a lot of slang from the era that I tried out. And it just it felt, I felt it took the reader out of the moment. I just wanted to be kind of timeless. I didn’t want to be contemporary, or old fashioned. So it took a while. But as soon as I found her with a great help of my fabulous editor, Nan Graham, who is here, really the book would not have happened without her. Because I think you get so close to this stuff, you have no idea whether it’s any good or not. And I’m a fast writer, but I’m sloppy. And I just I write down whatever comes into my head, and I look at it, this is just awful. So, I just have to keep on rewriting and rewriting.

Okay, but where did the short chapters come in? Because you fly through this book. I mean, a lot happens. Yeah, a lot of good stuff a lot about a lot happens. But your chapters are maybe three to five pages. I mean, it’s there were what, 50-something chapters in this book.

I have a short attention span.

There you go. It’s very cinematic.

Yes, thank you. I’ve been told that. Once I put it in first person present, this will sound so flaky, but I can actually kind of see it. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m name dropping but sitting on the set of the movie of making The Glass Castle, right. It was just it was very informative for me about character. The actors there were so passionate about authenticity about understanding these crazy people who are my family members, and they would ask such brilliant and straightforward questions about you know, what did your dad Woody Harrelson, what did your dad do with his hands when he talked to you that kind of thing? And I wouldn’t tell him was on a panel with Lisa Genova, somebody asked her, who wrote Still Alice, somebody asked her what was the best fiction writing advice anybody ever gave you? And she said, take an acting class. At the time I thought it was stupid, like what does that have to do with anything? But then when I went full-fledged into fiction, which, in a way Hang the Moon is my first fully, fully fiction, even though a lot of is based on historical events, but I get it now. I get it because you have to understand these people you’re writing about. You have to get inside your head. So watching, I was sitting down with Brie Larson who played me in The Glass Castle and she’s kind of subdued and low key. We were talking for about a half an hour and she gets kind of loud and like kind of gesture-y and weird with this loud laugh. And then I realized, oh, she’s doing me. She completely transformed herself. And my jaw just dropped like how did she do that? Right and I think fiction writing is an act of empathy. And it’s putting yourself inside somebody else’s shoes and inside their mind and what would this person do in these circumstances? And so that’s what I was trying to do. And, again, please forgive me if I sound at all la di da, but it was just trying to understand this woman who lived 100 years ago— what would she do in these situations and trying to put yourself into that world.

Lived 100 years ago, under pretty remarkable circumstances, though, and you currently live in a corner of Virginia that is pretty close to where this book is set. Would you set that up for us and let us know what that landscape looks like? Because I think that’s a really important part of Hang the Moon.

05:41

Yeah, I live in Orange, Virginia, which it’s right at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So it’s, it’s, you know, there’s the plateau on one side and the mountains on the other. And Virginia is very, the flat parts were settled by the Blue Bloods and then the Scots Irish went to the mountains. So it’s very kind of divided sociologically, but in addition to that, the further west you get the kind of Wilder it gets, I love where I live, but it’s a very contradictory place. It’s very, a lot of social divide. It’s a constant inspiration for writing. Let’s just say I stole a lot for this book, I just, what was going on around me and the small towns, they all have the big man in town who controls everything. And that was that was the sort of thing that I put into this book.

I get stealing a little bit of that kind of thing, but also the way you write about isolation and the dangers of isolation and sort of exile within a community. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Sallie Kincaid has a moment where she’s kicked out of her family. Her dad makes a, he makes a decision that works for him and works for the new wife. And oh, there’s a kid right? So kid gets sent into exile with her aunt in the mountains.

You know, this book is like it’s about there’s a lot of moonshining, there’s a lot of shooting and driving around fast. But at its heart, it’s about family. It’s about how we fit into family and how we define ourselves and how other people define us. Sallie was a tomboy, and she adored her hard drinking bossy, overbearing father and wanted to be just like him. And then she got kicked out and brought back into the family right before she turned 18 and believed in the family mythology, that being a Kincaid meant you were special and different. And in some ways that helped her get through some tough times. In another way it blinded her to the things going on the the dilemmas that other people experienced.

So here we are. You’ve had a memoir that sat on top of the bestseller list for 461 weeks. Yeah, that’s pretty much the only response you can have. You wrote a novel ostensibly about your grandmother, and let’s call it the Wild West, because come on Half Broke Horses. Great story. And then we go to California in the 70s. And we’ve got a couple of little girls and a mom who may or may not feel slightly familiar. And now here we are with Sallie Kincaid in 1920s Virginia, and lots of stuff happens. But I want to talk about giving voice to women, because you’re taking these women who don’t necessarily get to tell their stories, right? If we look at the history, yeah, we’ve got Laura Ingalls, you know, digging the dirt house and all that. I was desperate for a sod house when I was a child, and my parents were not. My mother’s like, no, no, what are you doing? Get out of the dirt. But we don’t tell these stories. We don’t let women and girls tell the pieces in between. Right. And here you are across all of your books, whether memoir or fiction, this is what you’re doing. Do you feel a responsibility to your audience when you’re doing this? Or do you just really want to tell the story?

No, I’m sorry. I’m not that conscientious. I just write what interests me, and you write what you know. I mean, people say you write about strong women. Yeah, that’s the only kind of— I like stories about tough people during tough times. I like stories about survival. How do you get through these really, I’m not so good with existential angst, or that’s not my forte, right. It’s more just sort of like fighting for your life, and it fascinates me. And I think, you know, people have said, you’re so strong, you’re so tough. We’re all stronger and tougher than we realize. It’s just that some of us are lucky enough to have been tested and know how tough we are. And I think that Sallie’s being exiled from her family and then coming back. And she does, she does okay, when she comes back, she’s not perfect. She’s far from perfect. But I think her being exiled, she succeeds not in spite of the difficulties she went through, but because of them. I think it taught her toughness and humility on some of maybe not quite enough humility, but it just it taught her to, to understand that the people on the other side of the tracks have a tough time as well. So I firmly believe that everything in life is both a blessing and a curse. And you can turn over the worst thing in the world and find something wonderful about and you can feel sorry for yourself about all these awful things that happen to you. Or you put a harness on your demons and put them to work for you. And that’s, that’s kind of my philosophy in life. It’s like, look, people have said that I could feel sorry for myself, or angry with my parents because of whatever. What good would that do? I think I’m the luckiest person in the world. I really do. I mean, my parents didn’t give me everything, but they gave me great copy.

Lucky readers, Lucky readers. Part of why I want to bring back this idea of women’s stories, right and telling women’s stories, which, you know, we still don’t always get right. You know, even now, I mean, your books are all playing with this idea of an American mythology, right? The American Dream, yes. Where we’re supposed to be what we’re supposed to aspire to this, this idea of, in some ways, respectability. I mean, that’s all over the new book Hang the Moon. I mean, who’s respectable? Who’s not who decides who’s respectable? I It makes for great reading. But let’s talk about blowing up the American Dream for a second.

Yeah. You know, I mean, the book was set 100 years ago and I spent a lot of time reading newspapers from that period. I thought I was going to fall completely in love with the 1920s and want to go back there. And as bad as things are, they’ve gotten better, okay. And there was just so much attention to this notion of respectability, and others, the other people and, and one of the things, and prohibition is very much at the center of this book. And prohibition was kind of a nativist movement. It was a woman’s movement as well. But it was people saying, family is important, let’s get back to the good times like it used to be. There was some pressure, you know, that the idea of the crazy Germans coming over where their beer and the crazy Italians coming over with all their wine, let’s make America great like it used to be— sound familiar. It was a time of incredible pressure and divisiveness and with women they had taken on men’s jobs during the First World War and then they had to let go of those jobs once the main came back. So it’s very much a story about like, what role do we play in society and in our own lives. So when I wanted Sallie to be figuring out the same, you know, Sallie’s going through that same struggle against the backdrop of a country that is trying to figure out where it’s going. And it was a very dark time, in so many ways. It was so racist. It was so misogynistic, in so many ways. And it was just accepted that that was that was the way… As crazy as the time is right now, with the internet and everything. I think it’s hard to imagine 100 years ago, when electricity and automobiles were becoming available to people for the first time for the masses, and just the incredible anxiety and nervousness about this new technology. I read an obituary by a man who liked to brag that he had not set foot ever in a train or a streetcar or an automobile, these things were a threat to the American way of life to some people, and at the same time, America was urbanizing. So there was this astonishing pressure, what kind of country are we going to be? How do we define ourselves? What does it mean to be an American? And that’s kind of what prohibition was, on some level. There was also a genuine belief that if they could outlaw liquor, that crime would disappear. It was in the articles and the sermons of the time. It’s fascinating to read them because people actually believe this. We can eliminate liquor, we will eliminate crime, we can close the jails, we’ll use this money to educate people. It was this utopian ideal. It was a complete and utter disaster, it was a crime wave like we’d never seen before, the price of liquor went up and the quality went down, you know, and drinking actually increased. So it was, you know, it was a well-intended law in a way. But it was also the law of unintended consequences. What happens when you try to control people’s behavior? Now, of course, laws are supposed to control people’s behavior, right? But what happens when you try to take people’s choices away from them.

You know, this idea that we can make our own fortunes and that we can make our own way and then we can make our own world that is so much part of this American mythology. It’s also part of you family’s mythology. If we look at your grandmother, I mean, certainly if we look at your parents, but let’s go back to your grandmother for a second. Let’s go back to Lily and Half Broke Horses for a second. I mean, talk about making your own work. 15, she gets on the back of a horse and says, I’m gonna go teach because I don’t have an option. I mean, this is like, really deep seated. American mythology— the creation of the West, its making yourself, it’s making a life. And you know, yes, she gets married and does a little bootleg and does a little breaking of horses and all this good stuff. But she’s never quite what we might think of as a traditional, grandmotherly type, right? She always gets to keep herself. She gets to keep herself Which Sallie does, to a certain extent, there are other women in Hang the Moon who do not get to keep themselves No, but I’m dancing around this whole idea of mythology, whether it’s your family’s mythology or our country’s mythology, because you brought in an element of story that I was pleasantly surprised by. But I have to ask, and this really isn’t a spoiler, because I promise you, a bunch of you are going to figure it out as soon as you start reading because I was like, wait a minute— Henry Tudor and some of his family members may be a little bit of background to this book. Can we talk about this for a second?

Yes. I have long been fascinated by the story of Elizabeth the First, my parents would get into screaming arguments about Elizabeth, my mother hated her, and my father defended her. My oldest sister was born on her birthday and over identified with her. But I’ve always found it a really fascinating story of this woman who, she was expected to go nowhere, she was expected to be nothing. And by some bizarre set of circumstances, she ended up heading the family business, which happened to be running the country and did a fabulous job. So I was fascinated by that. And I was reading one time I was reading a biography of her, and I was thinking this is so white trash, you know, because they’re all marrying cousins and killing each other and doing all these tricks. And I was like, why don’t you take this story which a lot of people a lot of Americans don’t, their parents didn’t fight over Elizabeth. So a lot of people aren’t familiar with her story, which shocks me. But it’s a great story of survival against the odds of being underestimated and refusing to be pigeonholed. So why don’t you take this basic nuts and bolts of this story and put it in somewhat modern America? And it was my husband who suggested prohibition because you need some place where people can kill each other with random. So I, I hesitate to mention the background because I see people sometimes I see people’s eyes glazing over when they hear Tudors, like oh, no it’s a history lesson. But I love history. I love history, I think, you know, he who ignores history is doomed to repeat it. But beyond that, I’ve heard this expression, I love it has been attributed to Mark Twain, but he didn’t say that. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. We keep on going through these same— we have to keep on learning these same lessons about identity and all that I love the story of, of this woman who survives and prospers against all odds, but at a great price. That being said, this is not a retelling of Elizabeth the first.

It’s not, no.

This is also the reason that it took 17 drafts, because a very early version was. A couple of early versions where it’s sort of like, okay, West Virginia, Scotland, where I was just matching up on against what, Sallie had to become her own person. It’s one thing to be arrogant and high handed if you’re the monarch of England, it’s another to be arrogant and high handed if you’re a bootlegger, I had to make her own person, I’m fascinated by this journey of this woman who made it against all odds, and the price she paid. So that’s, that’s kind of the basic structure of it.

We’ve got all of these moving parts, you know, these women and their voices and the decisions they make, and this community that may or may not be prepared for the decisions these women are making. And I’m talking across all of the books mind you, like I really like not just Hang the Moon, yes, we are sort of focusing on this. But if you’ve read all of the books, you know exactly what I’m doing right here. I see heads nodding. You’re working with these incredibly complicated characters and in some cases, you’re working off of inspiration from whatever is in front of you family stories, what have you. But when do you know that you found the emotional truth of what you’re trying to do? Because it’s not the same as just being able to tell the story and hit the points and hit the beats. When do you know you have the thing? I mean, in this case, it took you 17 drafts.

That’s an interesting question. Especially when you’re taking things from real history, which I did— a lot of these characters are based on people who were around during Prohibition. When you’re putting all these pieces together, some from inspiration, some that are out there, and sometimes you end up with this like Frankenstein looking creature with legs are too long and it just doesn’t fit. And you read it like, this just is kind of bad. You know? So I don’t know. And that’s why I have a fabulous editor. And she tells me okay, you got it. But there is a point that sometimes where you’re like, I think this works. I think this feels true, this sounds true.

You’ve described yourself in the past that as being pathologically independent. Has that changed now? I mean, you’ve worked with Nan on four books now. I mean, your husband, you thanked him for millions of story points, yeah, in different places. And it sounds like you don’t get to be pathologically independent anymore when you’re creating these worlds.

You know, my husband has this good line about writing, he said that, you have to have faith in yourself and question yourself at the same time. It’s this funny balance, but I guess it’s true in all of life is that, you have to have faith, but you have to question yourself, and you have to constantly say, is this any good, and you have to be able to criticize yourself or take other people’s criticism. You have to, I don’t want compliments when I’m writing, I want somebody to tell me this doesn’t work. I don’t want to be embarrassed because you know, you can be when you put your stuff out there. I’d rather have somebody say, go back, do it again.

Everyone needs an editor. I mean, even when it’s just tiny bits of copy, everyone needs an editor. You have also talked about in the past about feeling more secure writing nonfiction, because everything was sort of laid out. The truth is in the details. And yet here you are the last three books, you get further and further away from I mean, I know Half Broke Horses was what did we call it?

A true-life novel.

Thank you, which I had never heard before. And I understand exactly what that subtitle means. But are you finally at a point where you don’t necessarily need to lean on the details of a thing to be able to find the truth of what you’re trying to do?

I thought I would never write fiction. I thought I wouldn’t, and for years, I said about myself and believed. I do not make things up. I have no imagination. Half Broke Horses was as close to the truth as I could get it. My mother told me about her mother, and I have no idea how much of it is true, so I called it fiction. In addition to that I wrote it first person, but I was as close as I could get. The Silver Star is cobbled together from things I know, I think it was for Silver Star and I couldn’t say I don’t make things up. I was on a book tour kind of like this and I said, I have no imagination. I don’t make things up. And the gentleman in the front row, he raised his hand, and very gently told me, he said, I think you have a fabulous imagination, you’re just afraid of your own creativity. And it just about knocked my socks off. Because I think he’s right, he was onto something, and I thought about it a whole lot. Because both of my parents had a relationship of convenience with the truth. And my father had a bunch of characters in his head, that he would trot out whenever he needed. And my mother would just, she was just out there. I mean, she wasn’t. Well, she was kind of a liar. But she just she just made things up all the time. And I just I think I sought out the truth. The truth will set you free. It was the answers were in the truth. It was there. It was only thanks to that gentleman that I realized; I think I can go a little bit further in this direction. And I’ve been thinking about this story for a while and thought I’d give it a shake. And most of the incidents in Hang the Moon are inspired by two live events that happened during Prohibition, right. Originally, I clung to it too tight. And my fabulous editor Nan Graham had to pull my long bony fingers off the facts and said, you have to make this your own make these people your own. Right. And that that was quite a transition for me. But she was absolutely right once I kind of just relaxed and try to see things as this fictional character who I created, I was able to make things up, which is kind of like lying, but it’s not. It’s not a story. So, when I was trying to cram it too hard into to take these facts and cram it into this fictional book. It just it wasn’t working. And I had to take out pieces of what really happened and make it my own. And then that was, it was a little shocking for me that you can do that and not be struck by lightning. But I did kind of get there. And I’m like, oh, this is what they call fiction now. Okay, I get it. It’s kind of scary, because you can go in any direction. It’s like navigating in the ocean. You can go there, you can go there, you can go there. So, if you don’t have the facts to guide you, and that’s where your whole question about like, well, you know, I mean, if it really happened, then I don’t have to worry about could this happen? But when you’re writing when you’re writing fiction, you have to say, is this believable? Does this feel true? Does this feel right? Does this feel true to this character? Would they do this?

I’m going to grab a question from the audience for a second having written fiction and nonfiction which is easier to express your own voice or the voice of a fictional character? And you’ve sort of answered it, but not entirely, which is why I’m asking the question.

I find nonfiction easier. But fiction more potentially powerful, because you can manipulate it and move it around a little. But I do feel that most fiction, at least the kind of fiction I’m drawn to is deeply rooted in truth and what’s out there?

Are you reading for character first? Are you reading for language first?

Yeah, character, I think,

Because that’s what it feels like, from reading you. But I mean, you could argue that voice is the thing that swings the hardest out of each of your books, like there’s a voice, there’s a distinct voice to each of the books. But at the same time, I’m kind of like, well, is voice its own character.

It’s interesting. I think that, you know, if you don’t have the voice its just not gonna work period. But the characters, they have to feel real, you just have to kind of know these people, those are kind of the building blocks, then the language, I mean, it can be really bad at first, and you just keep on going through it over and over again and make it feel… I also read all of my books aloud once I finish them.

Okay, I was wondering about that, because they fly. I mean, just the narrative thrust of all of your books. It’s wild, how quickly you can turn the pages. And I don’t mean in sort of the psychological thriller sense of I need to know who did it, but it is kind of like, wait a minute, I didn’t even realize I gone that far back quickly.

Thank you. I tried to make it kind of conversational. I’m not interested in you know, I mean, God bless those writers who do these long, complicated sentences. I’m just I’m not. That’s not me.

When it comes to craft, though. And we’ve had multiple questions from both the online audience and Eventbrite and all that. When it comes to craft, do you have sort of a specific discipline that keeps you in your seat and writing as it were.

Oh, yeah, I’m obsessive. I just want to get back to the computer as soon as I can. Like, it’s the first thing I think about every morning and the last thing I think about and I just, I want to get to these people and work this darn thing out. I mean, this book took me, depending on when you want to say I started, almost eight years, but I just wanted to get Sallie’s story out. I grew to really like Sallie, well, she’s kind of flawed. She’s not perfect. But I really grew to care about her and just wanted her to know, I’m talking like a crazy person that about this person who I made it up, but I just, I cared about her and a ridiculous story and her flaws and her blinders and how she’s not a bad person, but she had some bad things and make some really bad decisions. But it was a tough time. And you know, and what would you do to resolve this stupid story and tell it and get it out there and get it done. But I sit down in the morning, and like I said, I’m a fast but sloppy reader, and then you go through it again and go through it again and just like, does this work? Does this work?

I mean, I read somewhere that at one point, you and your husband were acting out problem points in the book, because it was the only way to figure out what had gone wrong.

If somebody’s dialogue, especially Sallie, didn’t feel right. My husband would play the other character. And I’d be Sallie and he’d say, just say what comes to mind, don’t think it out, he’d play The Duke going, well, I’m gonna…. And so, I’d just write that down. The only problem with that is that sometimes I kept on using these mid-century curse words. And so, I’d have to take those out. I found this great resource. It’s Greene’s Dictionary of Slang and I realized that all of my curse words come from like, it’s post GI curse words. Can I say a curse word? Dumb ass. It’s a mid-century curse word and “cojones” It was a that was Hemingway around I think was 1937. So, a lot of this slang, much of slang came around during the 20s. And I was really trying hard to have this book in casual language. The slang from the period made it sound like kinda Oh, 23 skidoo, that’s not gonna work. So, Sallie was a real potty mouth, originally, but I ended up taking out most of the curse words. And at first, it just broke my heart to lose those, but it actually felt more authentic afterwards. Deadwood notwithstanding, I think people didn’t curse as much.

Deadwood is its own special thing. And actually, that came up in a different interview I did last week. I don’t know what’s in the air with Deadwood right now. But something’s going on. No, I think it’s true though. And I do you know, the danger with historical fiction is I was sort of making fun of it at the top of the show, but this ye olde time language thing and it just rips you right out of the story and your eyes kind of cross, it’s just not what I want as a reader.

Ditto. And similarly with dialect I made the decision not to put stuff in dialect because Sallie, the story takes place in 1919 to 20, around there, she didn’t sound funny to herself and its first person present. So she’s not like, you know, “I said to the…” You know, that being said, when I read the contemporary newspapers, they would quote mountain people in dialect or African American people they would quote and dialect. To me, quoting dialect is very often a tool of otherness, this is how they sound. You never hear upper class people, I mean, they sound funny too, but they’re never quoted. So I made that decision and I also flicked a couple of times, at her thinking that other people sound funny, because you gotta remember, at this time, people didn’t know what other people sounded like, because you were you’re usually confined to your own county, at least people like Sallie were. Radio wasn’t around yet. So and the first World War just happened and people came back, it was so fascinating reading these letters, from the period about like, I met somebody who had an Italian accent. And it was just so, so exotic to them to hear somebody with a different accent, because people weren’t going in and out of these communities. It was just so insular. And this was the period in history when it stopped being that insular and that’s why it was so scary, and why people who looked different and sounded different, were exotic and threatening, and kind of scary.

I think part of the appeal too, of historical fiction is we get to step back and say, well, that wouldn’t have been me. And sometimes we’re not right when we say that you say it anyway. And that is always interesting to me people’s responses, where it’s like, well, I would have done it differently. And I’m thinking, not really, if you get kicked out of your family and kicked off the farm kicked out of your community, it’s not like you could open a bank account and just move.

Right. Right. That’s an interesting point, because I wanted to make Sallie sympathetic and good, but she can’t be woke. She can’t. And she also can’t feel like she just came from some sort of a therapy meeting. I mean, she’s a product of her time and she has to have some of that baggage and some of that obliviousness.

Yes, shame is not a concept that your characters are clued in on. But wow, do they carry a lot of it. Yeah. A lot, a lot of it. But I mean, I think that’s part of the beauty of stepping into a novel like this, Hang the Moon and just being able to say, hey, wait a minute. Who are these people? What is this world? I mean, Appalachia is not a place. I’ve spent a lot of time in Virginia. I’ve driven through Virginia. I’ve done the whole DC, but DC Virginia is not, it’s very different.

Northern Virginia is not Virginia.

And that’s exactly it, it’s not. Virginia, and there are pockets. There are pockets place now that are still very much like the 1920s. It’s not but…

No, but it’s real close. And that’s one of the reasons I sort of felt qualified to write it even though you know, I mean, it is set 100 years ago, but I think that I’m more qualified than many people because I grew up largely without indoor plumbing and without electricity. So, I kind of know that world, but also because there are people who are kind of stuck in in time, they say “you win a battle, you forget it pretty quickly, you lose the battle you never forget”. And these are people who never forget. And they they’re very steeped in their own history. So it’s very close. That being said, I did have to put myself back somewhat. What was it like to go through all of this and the scariness, the threat and the fear of this changing world. I mean, this is the jazz era, and everybody’s sitting around reading Gatsby and doing the Charleston and I thought I thought I’d kind of fall in love with a period. But you read the newspapers and the most popular movie at the time was Birth of a Nation, which was glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. And because I’m a research nerd, I watched that and my eyes are still burned, got holes burned and it was just it was like, wow, yeah. Anybody who wants to get nostalgic, do a little research, okay, because you go back, and you look at these times…

Lindbergh made some nasty speeches. I get it you flew a plane but at the same time, wow, the things that came out of his mouth.

And a lot of the heroes of that period were that way, a very mixed, very mixed bag. So I just think it’s very important to remember, simpler, better times… not really, and especially for women, especially for women. And you know, the automobile was so monumental in changing people’s lives. I think more for women than for men. Men could hop on a horse and go somewhere for women they, especially a lady you had to you had to get into carriage and carriages were very expensive. You hook up the wagon. It was not a one-person job and going into town took all day, it was an all-day thing. Washing the clothes, forget it. Even women that had not much means hired somebody to wash the clothes. So running the household it was it was hard and it was dirty and it was strenuous. Technology changed so much of that, and people were really kind of threatened about, well, where are women going in the world? And that’s, you know, Sallie, I mean, she was not woke, she would never call herself a feminist. But she was somebody who just didn’t like the role that was assigned to her.

And also, we didn’t get to wear pants. We didn’t have pockets.

No, I’m convinced that women cut their hair short, because of cars because most of the automobiles were open, and you wore one of those pompadours in an open car, you know, the automobile was huge, and I believe pants and the more reasonable dresses because those hoop skirts would never fit into the cars. It was a time that technology was really redefining people’s lives. Some of the women were really clinging to the old roles. You know, in fact, prohibition was largely a woman’s movement.

Oh, I do know that. There’s a lot. There’s a lot that people are going to get to play with in Hang the Moon, but you’re about to be on the road for four to six weeks. It was long. We were talking about this a second ago. But what have you learned from your readers? I mean, you’ve been doing this book thing since 2005.

Yeah, readers are a lot smarter than I am. One time somebody asked me a question as well. Why didn’t your mother sell that land? Y’all could have had a normal life. And I said, I don’t know, and I’ve asked my mom. I can’t get a straight answer. A woman in the audience raises her hand. She said I know. I said how do you know? She said my book club discussed it. So, she had a really good answer too. So I’ve never been to therapy. I just hang out with book club people. They’re really smart. You know? So readers have challenged me and people will push me on things. I love talking to them but the lesson I have to keep on learning from readers and it’s so I’ll be signing books and to be some decked out woman and she’s all Neiman Marcus-ed out or something. Again, I’m thinking as you come over and, say, girlfriend, you and I could be sisters, right? You know, my mom was a cocktail waitress, and my daddy was a truck driver and got in the car one day and drove away. And so listen, I keep on having to learn, do not judge people and they tell me their stories. Once this young African American woman, she said, Miss Walls, I’ll be honest with you, when your book was assigned, she said, I didn’t want to read about no West Virginia hillbillies. She said, you know, same line, but girlfriend, you and I could be sisters. And that’s what I love about storytelling, is I think that honesty is contagious. And when you start telling your stories, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, it encourages other people to tell their stories. A lot of us walk around in armor like I was, and you know, it protects us, but it also isolates you. And once you take that armor off, I was unprepared for the kindness and the goodness of people, I was unprepared to be loved and understood, and I think that people have they’ve shocked me with their compassion, and that’s why I love storytelling.

Has that been the biggest reward for you?

Oh, yeah. Oh, far and away.

Back in the day. I mean, you did the gossip thing before the gossip thing became, you know, Instagram.

Yeah, I was the bonehead who sticks microphones into people’s celebrities have phases and ask them who designs their outfits. And I thought, you know, like, how does it get any better than this? Right? Yeah. But I believe the truth will set you free. But the truth is complicated.

I think we do have to leave space. I mean, you’ve said this before in other interviews that there are people who love your mom, and there are people who cannot get away from your mother fast enough. I mean, and it’s wild to me that we have these responses to people we’ll never meet or people who are fictional. I mean, I frequently talk about fictional— I’m a bookseller. I talk about fictional characters like they’re sitting next to me. It’s not weird. It’s my job. It’s what I do, but the idea that we can actually change the world one story at a time.

I completely believe that. I think I’ve just been so fortunate, people read The Glass Castle in schools, right? It was banned in a Dallas suburb. One parent objected to it and the other parents, and the schoolteachers and God bless them, the students got together. It was a very well to do suburb and they said, they said, we need to read stories like this, and they invited me to come talk. And another author warned me that oh, those kids are brats, they’re horrible, you’re going to hate it. We had the most amazing time. And then here’s the PS it’s so beautiful— a young student hung back and said, I want to thank you for that story because I had a similar situation, and your story gave me the courage to tell about my parents and what was going on. And we poor folks have not cornered the market on weird parents. It’s this storytelling that is so magical. And I understand why people want to protect their kids and keep them away from all the bad books out there. But the truth is, the way to protect kids, in my opinion, is not to isolate them and insulate them, but to give them the tools and the intelligence and the storytelling, and to find the strength within themselves, to know that they that they can deal with these things and discuss these things, in the safety of their classrooms and in their houses. I just think that the whole process of storytelling, it brings us so much closer together, we all look different, we come from different parts of the world. But beyond the appearances, you know, we all want the same thing we want respect and security and to be loved. And that’s what storytelling does, is it connects the similarities that we have.

Do you feel like you’ve finally been heard?

Oh, yeah, a long time ago.

Oh, no, I mean, 35 languages for Glass Castle is not nothing.

No, no, I am. I am so lucky and like I said, sometimes readers hear me better than I hear myself. They will challenge me: you said this, but I’m not sure I agree with you on that. I love that. I love that, I love being wrong, because that’s how you learn. You’re like, oh, you’re right about that. I was being too glib or whatever. So yeah, I’m heard and then some, kids write papers on my book they sent me like, a, you know, they, it’s just it. Somebody asked me, is this a dream come true for you? I would have to be a crazy person to dream this, it so far exceeds anything I expected from a raggedy little story.

Do you know what the next thing is?

No, no, no. I am obsessive and I’m only good at one thing at a time, I realize.

That’s not unreasonable. I mean, multitasking really is overrated.

I don’t have to worry about it, I can’t do it. I just, I can’t think about two things at a time.

It’s just I finished Hang the Moon and I need another Jeannette Walls. That’s really, it’s pure self-interest. Anyway, Jeannette Walls thank you so much for joining us. Hang the Moon is out now. It’s the April Barnes and Noble book club pick and join us on May 2 online, you can dial in I think it’s 3pm. Eastern, so and then we’ll do all of the dirt. We will get all of the dirt. Thank you again.