Jeannette Walls talked about attempts to ban books, including her own memoir, The Glass Castle, on MSNBC’s Velshi.
Walls’ memoir, published in 2005 by Scribner, tells the story of a turbulent childhood marked by poverty, homelessness, and parents who made a series of poor decisions. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect.”
The book, a longtime New York Times bestseller, has been the target of frequent challenges and bans across the country. The American Library Association reports that it was the ninth-most challenged or banned book of 2012, with some objecting to the book’s profanity and depiction of sexual assault.
MSNBC host Ali Velshi asked Walls how she was able to get to the point where she could write about her childhood.
“I was terrified,” she said, “I didn’t think anybody would get it. I thought it would be banned and ridiculed and that people would just look down on me, and the opposite has happened.”
Walls noted that many readers have told her they connect with the book because of their own difficult childhoods.
“It breaks my heart that this is being banned in schools,” she said. “People want to protect children. I get that. We all want what’s best for the children. But I would argue that the way to protect children is not to put them in a bubble and pretend that these bad things don’t exist, but rather to give them the tools to deal with the complications and ugliness that life often presents us, and that many of these kids are already dealing with.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
