Jeannette Walls was born in Arizona in 1960, the second of Rex and Rose Mary Walls's four children. Throughout her childhood, the family was itinerant, moving to mining towns throughout the American Southwest; when Jeannette was ten, the family moved to Welch, West Virginia, where Rex was born and where Jeannette and her siblings Lori and Brian would spend their adolescence. The family lived in extreme poverty, exacerbated by Rex's alcoholism and irresponsibility and Rose Mary's mercurial nature and tendency to choose her art over her family. Jeannette moved to New York City at the age of seventeen, following her sister Lori; her brother Brian joined them a year later and her then...
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