Aside from her Southern accent, Jeannette Walls bears no outward traces of the extremely poor, nomadic childhood she chronicles in her brilliant new memoir, The Glass Castle. The tall, elegant MSNBC columnist bravely bares her lifelong secret of growing up with her three siblings and having to eat butter for dinner, make her own braces, and suffer the whims of her artistic, intelligent and utterly selfish parents, one she thought would get her kicked out of polite society and leave her socially ostracized once it was revealed. Walls's greatest strength is her ability to tell her story with compassion and empathy rather than bitterness, letting the story unfold from her childhood perspective, from cooking hot dogs at age three and catching on fire, to growing up faster than most of us can probably imagine having to ever do.

She imbues her gambling, alcoholic father, Rex Walls, with a mix of paternal love and bumbling despair and her mother's artistic megalomania and inability to hold a job with frustration, tenderness and occasional humor. When he offers her up to the winner of a pool game as a teenager, or successfully tries to coax money from her meager budget while her mom is away, we see a grown man utterly incapable of giving his children what they need. However, Walls, who eventually moved to New York, attended Barnard and began rising up the journalistic ranks, has taken enough time to distill her feelings about . She takes her title from her math and science focused dad, who always promised his kids he would build them a magical, perfect glass castle in which to live, one of the major metaphors for in the book. The Glass Castle is gripping, passionate and memorable, a book that will leave any reader who's paying attention stunned with its vivid imagery while proving, once again, that truth is indeed far, far stranger than fiction can every hope to be. In person, Walls is charming, intelligent and introspective, delving deep into her own psyche while putting forth the idea that memoir should be "universal." Below is but a portion of a two and a half hour interview conducted in Walls' home.