Reading List

Authors Like Jeannette Walls

Q: What should I read after The Glass Castle?

Tara Westover’s Educated (2018), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), three memoirs of childhoods shaped by an unpredictable father.

Q: Does Jeannette Walls have a new book?

Her most recent book is Hang the Moon (2023), a novel set in Prohibition-era Virginia. No new title had been announced as of October 2026.

Q: Which Jeannette Walls book should I read first?

The Glass Castle (2005). If you want fiction, The Silver Star (2013) follows two sisters who are left by their unstable mother and travel from California to a small town in Virginia.

When Jeannette Walls was three, living in a trailer park in southern Arizona, she was badly burned cooking hot dogs on the stove and needed skin grafts; her father, Rex, took her out of the hospital without paying. Rex kept promising to build the family a glass castle. Instead the four children ended up in his hometown of Welch, West Virginia, in a three-room house with no plumbing or heat. At 17 Walls left for New York to join her sister Lori, graduated from Barnard in 1984 and became a gossip columnist. The Glass Castle (2005) has sold more than four million copies and spent more than 400 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The ten writers below share her ground: chaotic families, poverty told without self-pity, and the long work of leaving home.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Family · Poverty · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jeannette Walls, start with Tara Westover, whose Educated (2018) is another escape from an unpredictable father into education, and Mary Karr, whose The Liars’ Club (1995) is the memoir of a hard-drinking Texas family. Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) tells a poor Southern childhood as fiction. Further down are the frontier novelist behind Half Broke Horses and a journalist who argues that poverty is not only a family story.

10 authors like Jeannette Walls

Frontier women before Lily Casey

Willa Cather

American · O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918)

Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved with her family to Nebraska at nine. My Ántonia follows a Bohemian immigrant girl growing up on the Nebraska prairie, as remembered by a boy who knew her. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923 for One of Ours and died in 1947.

The ancestor of Half Broke Horses: frontier women who do men’s work, hold farms and families together, and are remembered by someone else. Cather is lyrical where Walls is brisk, but both admire toughness without romanticising hardship.

— Lisanne

Every book by Willa Cather →

The memoir of a hard childhood

Maya Angelou

American · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Gather Together in My Name (1974)

Angelou was born in St. Louis in 1928 and died in 2014. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of her seven autobiographies, covers her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, and in California, including the rape she suffered at eight and the years of near silence that followed.

The memoir that showed a childhood of displacement and harm could be told with humour and without self-pity, which is Walls’s register too. Both write children moved between parents and places, and the adults who failed them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Maya Angelou →

A charming father, an empty table

Frank McCourt

Irish-American · Angela’s Ashes (1996), ’Tis (1999)

McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 and grew up in Limerick after his family returned to Ireland. Angela’s Ashes, about a childhood of hunger and an alcoholic father, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1997. Some Limerick residents disputed many of its details; McCourt called it “a memoir, not an exact history” and admitted inventing one story.

The closest match to The Glass Castle in its father: charming, unreliable, drinking the family’s money. Both writers tell the worst things in a child’s matter-of-fact voice, and both raise the question of how exactly a memoir can remember.

— Lisanne

Every book by Frank McCourt →

The family as a liars’ club

Mary Karr

American · The Liars’ Club (1995), Lit (2009)

Karr was born in 1955 in Groves, an oil-refinery town in East Texas. The Liars’ Club covers her childhood with a storytelling, hard-drinking father and an artistic, unstable mother; Lit follows her own alcoholism and recovery. She also wrote The Art of Memoir (2015).

Karr’s parents and Walls’s are uncannily alike: a father who tells great stories and a mother with an artist’s temperament who cannot cope. Karr is more interested in her own adult life; read Lit for what comes after leaving.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Karr →

Poor and Southern, as fiction

Dorothy Allison

American · Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)

Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1949 and died in 2024. Bastard Out of Carolina, a novel drawing on her own childhood, follows Bone, a girl growing up poor in Greenville County who is abused by her stepfather; it was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Allison writes the poverty and the stigma that Walls writes, including the “white trash” label, but as fiction and with a darker centre. Read her to see how a writer turns the same material into a novel.

— Lisanne

A Manchester childhood

Andrea Ashworth

English · Once in a House on Fire (1998)

Ashworth was born in Manchester in 1969. Once in a House on Fire describes her childhood with two violent stepfathers; she went on to study at Oxford, where she became a junior research fellow. The book won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1999.

The British companion: the same mix of danger and love and a bright child reading her way out, in 1970s and 1980s Manchester. Ashworth writes more lyrically than Walls, but both are clear-eyed about how love and neglect can share one house.

— Lisanne

Leaving a father’s world

Tara Westover

American · Educated (2018)

Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family and had no formal schooling until she entered Brigham Young University at 17; she went on to a PhD in history at Cambridge. Her parents, through their lawyer, have disputed her account, and her mother later published a book giving her own view.

The closest modern match: a gifted daughter, a father whose beliefs put the family in danger, and education as the way out. Westover’s break with her family is sharper than Walls’s.

— Lisanne

Five young men, one town

Jesmyn Ward

American · Salvage the Bones (2011), Men We Reaped (2013)

Ward was born in 1977 and grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Men We Reaped is a memoir of five young Black men from her community, her brother among them, who died within four years. Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) both won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Ward writes rural poverty in the South as Walls writes Appalachia, but she insists on race and on the system around her family, not only on the family itself. Read her for a sharper view of the same hard places.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jesmyn Ward →

Working class, not a cautionary tale

Sarah Smarsh

American · Heartland (2018), Bone of the Bone (2025)

Smarsh was born in Kingman, Kansas, in 1980 into a family of farmers and labourers. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also wrote She Come By It Natural (2020), essays on Dolly Parton.

Smarsh tells a childhood close to Walls’s, with frequent moves and little money, but frames it as an argument about class in America rather than the story of one remarkable family.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sarah Smarsh →

The argument with the memoir

Barbara Ehrenreich

American · Nickel and Dimed (2001), Bright-Sided (2009)

Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, in 1941, trained as a biologist and became a journalist; she died in 2022. For Nickel and Dimed she took jobs as a waitress, cleaner, nursing-home aide and Walmart employee to see whether she could live on low wages, and found she could not.

The writer on this list who complicates the rest. A memoir like The Glass Castle can make poverty look like the result of one family’s choices; Ehrenreich shows how wages and rents trap people who do everything right. Read her after Walls for the structural view.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Ehrenreich →

Where to start if you loved Jeannette Walls

If you loved The Glass Castle, read Tara Westover.

Educated: an Idaho childhood without school, and the cost of leaving.

If you want the classic family memoir, read Mary Karr.

The Liars’ Club: a storytelling father, a fragile mother, East Texas.

If you loved Half Broke Horses, read Willa Cather.

My Ántonia: an immigrant girl who works the Nebraska land like a man.

If you want poverty told as a system, read Barbara Ehrenreich.

Nickel and Dimed: a journalist tries to live on low-wage work.

If you want more Jeannette Walls, read her in order.

The Glass Castle (2005), Half Broke Horses (2009), about her grandmother Lily Casey Smith, and the novels The Silver Star (2013) and Hang the Moon (2023).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jeannette Walls

Who writes like Jeannette Walls?

Tara Westover, Mary Karr and Dorothy Allison are the closest matches. Westover and Karr wrote memoirs of childhoods shaped by unpredictable parents, and Allison turned a poor Southern childhood into the novel Bastard Out of Carolina.

What should I read after The Glass Castle?

Tara Westover’s Educated (2018), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), three memoirs of childhoods shaped by an unpredictable father.

Does Jeannette Walls have a new book?

Her most recent book is Hang the Moon (2023), a novel set in Prohibition-era Virginia. No new title had been announced as of October 2026.

Is The Glass Castle a true story?

Yes. It is Walls’s memoir of her own childhood with her parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, and her three siblings. Half Broke Horses (2009), about her grandmother, is subtitled “A True-Life Novel”.

Which Jeannette Walls book should I read first?

The Glass Castle (2005). If you want fiction, The Silver Star (2013) follows two sisters who are left by their unstable mother and travel from California to a small town in Virginia.

Is Jeannette Walls like Tara Westover?

In part. Both grew up in families that ignored ordinary rules and found their way out through education, Walls at Barnard and Westover at Brigham Young and Cambridge. Westover’s break with her family is sharper, and her parents have disputed her account.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Jeannette Walls

10 authors like Jeannette Walls

Willa Cather

Maya Angelou

Frank McCourt

Mary Karr

Dorothy Allison

Andrea Ashworth

Tara Westover

Jesmyn Ward

Sarah Smarsh

Barbara Ehrenreich

Where to start if you loved Jeannette Walls

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jeannette Walls

Who writes like Jeannette Walls?

What should I read after The Glass Castle?

Does Jeannette Walls have a new book?

Is The Glass Castle a true story?

Which Jeannette Walls book should I read first?

Is Jeannette Walls like Tara Westover?

Lisanne Swart

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