Hearing Jeannette Walls speak at Davis-Kidd about The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses this past week was an awe-inspiring experience. That woman is a living legend, and she did not disappoint. I'm only sorry I did not bring a notebook to record all her pearls of wisdom, but I remember a few. My favorite is her theory on endings. She and her mom were arguing one day about something - maybe Jeannette's writing - and Jeannette was afraid it wasn't going to work out. Her mom kept insisting that it would, and so Jeannette countered, "But what if it doesn't, Mom? Some things don't end well."
And that's when crazy, brilliant Rosemary Walls said, "Well that's when you know you haven't come to the end yet."
But here is my favorite part of the talk, and my favorite passage so far in Half Broke Horses, a novel about Jeannette's grandmother. Her grandmother learned to break horses when she was young, and her mother feared that she'd get hurt falling.
"...I got thrown plenty, which terrified Mom, but Dad just waved her off and helped me up.
'Most important thing in life,' he would say, 'is learning how to fall.'"
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