“Everybody has something.”

Those are three words that stuck with me from Jeannette Walls’ interview with Colbert a couple nights ago (Colbert’s putty in her hands). You probably know that Walls, a gossip columnist by day, is the author of The Glass Castle, a big, bold bestselling memoir about growing up poor and at times homeless (if you’ve already read it, you might enjoy getting lost in the nearly 600 reader reviews of Amazon).
And here’s a video from speech she gave—not sure where–about her life and the writing of her book. She explains in part two of this speech that she received her highest compliment about her story from a kid in a classroom in northern Alabama. It was the first book he ever read cover to cover, because, he told her, “This here is a fine white-trash story.”

On MSNBC.com, where she pens her column, she talks about the incredible reaction to her book:

Whenever I hear someone’s personal history, it always makes me like them more—even if the information is supposedly negative. It helps me understand them. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I enjoy being a gossip columnist. But the ironic thing is that I didn’t realize that people would respond that way to my story, too.