Jeannette Walls, author of Half Broke Horses, Might be Related to Imus?

Imus had met Jeannette Walls in her previous life as an entertainment reporter for MSNBC, but, naturally, could not remember having spoken with her before today. In his defense, he told her, “I can’t remember who was on this program Friday.”

Now a New York Times bestselling author, Walls lives in rural Virginia, though her family, like Imus’s, hails from Arizona, the basis for her latest book Half Broke Horses.

“I’m going to make a really sincere effort not to make this about me,” Imus said, then told Walls about the ranch called The Willows, where he grew up, which he believes was around 20 miles from where Walls’s grandmother lived. “I spent a great deal of time in bars in Seligman, and Ash Fork, and my uncle used to be the chief of police in Kingman.”

Walls marveled at all the coincidences. “Oh my gosh, we could be related!” she said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

The Glass Castle, Walls’s first book, is a memoir about her self-described “wacky childhood.” In its opening page, she recalls getting ready to attend “some fabulous party” in Manhattan, glancing out the window at a homeless woman rooting through garbage, and realizing that homeless woman was her mother.

Half Broke Horses is, in Imus’s opinion, a prequel to The Glass Castle, because it focuses on how and why Walls’s mother became the free spirit that she remains to this day, at 76 years old.

“I originally intended to write it about Mom, and try to write it in her voice, but Mom kept saying my grandmother is the one who’s really interesting; plus, I’m a lot more like my grandmother than I’m like my mother,” Walls said. “I found it a lot easier to write in my grandmother’s voice than in my own.”

The book is technically a novel, since Walls relied on third- and fourth-hand descriptions to piece together her family’s past. Her grandmother Lily was, by all accounts, “a tough old broad” who, at age 15, traveled 500 miles by horse during World War I to teach in Red River, Arizona, and other remote towns in the vicinity.

“She was a horse-breaking, hooch-selling, card-playing, gun-toting schoolteacher, and she just really did what needed to be done, and didn’t complain about it, and wasn’t shy about it,” Walls said.

Her grandmother and mother had a contentious relationship, one that impacted the course of Walls’s life as well. Lily, she told Imus, “was somebody who tamed the horses, and tamed the land, and tamed all the school kids, and I think my mother was the only creature she ever encountered who she couldn’t tame.”

In one particular instance, Walls’s mother decided she wanted to live like the Havasupai Indians, and began spending more and more time with them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, in one instance swimming alongside them in nothing but her underwear. That is, until Lily found out about it and “beat the tar out of her,” as Walls put it.

“Around that time, mom resolved that if she ever had children, she would never impose rules on them, would never punish them, and would let them do pretty much as they pleased,” Walls said. “That’s sort of the way I was raised.”

She did not, as Imus put it, realize she was growing up in a “tornado”; at least, not right away. “I didn’t not realize it probably until we moved to Southern West Virginia, a little place without heat and running water,” Walls said. “We went hungry a lot of the time.”

Though her father billed their lives as an adventure, Walls spent most of her adult life hiding her past. “I was terrified—there was no doubt in my mind I was going to be ridiculed and humiliated,” she said of the decision, at her husband’s insistence, to write The Glass Castle.

In the wake of the literary success that resulted from her unconventional upbringing, Walls admitted, “I feel like an idiot now.”

-Julie Kanfer