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This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Jeannette Walls
In Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, Walls spins the story of her iron-willed grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, the fearless matriarch who rode 500 miles alone on horseback to Arizona as a teenager and later sold moonshine to make ends meet during prohibition; readers will remember Lily's daughter, Rosemary, from Walls' bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle. Fiercely independent and unsympathetic to weakness, Lily begins helping her father break horses at the age of five and becomes a teacher by the time she reaches 15. Her father tells her when she is young that "the most important thing was learning how to fall," a lesson that will prove invaluable throughout the trials Lily faces later in life. She pushes through the accidental death of her best friend at the hands of factory machinery, the torment of being swindled and humiliated by her "crum-bum" first husband, and the agony of her little sister's suicide brought on by the shame of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Through the hardships she encounters, Lily remains stalwart; though she is fired frequently for being too progressive in her teaching, she only becomes bolder at each new school, eager to educate the children not only about reading and arithmetic but also about political and religious freedom. Shaking things up becomes Lily's favorite pastime; after deciding to use the old hearse she'd purchased as a taxi, she takes a group of women from Brooklyn on the ride of their lives when the brakes give out and she strategically rolls the car over to stop them from crashing (she calmly explains to her hysterical passengers that they've merely "had the lace knocked off of their panties"). Walls has written for Esquire, New York Magazine, and USA Today and wrote for "Scoop" at MSNBC.com for eight years. She appears regularly on CNN, the "Today" show, and "PrimeTimeLive". She lives in Virginia with her husband, author John Taylor.
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