B&N Reads, BN Book Club, Fiction, Guest Post

The Range of Truth: An Exclusive Guest Post from Jeannette Walls, Author of Hang the Moon, Our April Book Club Pick

By Jeannette Walls / March 28, 2023 at 4:36 am

Hardcover $28.00

Hang the Moon (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

Hardcover $28.00

With Hang the Moon, Jeannette Walls brings us an engrossing novel about a young woman in Prohibition-era Virginia, her complicated family, and the fractured small town that surrounds them. Secrets and scandals swirl around her family, but with her trademark tenacity, Sallie won’t let those hold her back. Fall in love with Sallie and all her complexities and contradictions in this stunning story. Keep reading for a guest post from Jeannette Walls about what inspired her foray into historical fiction with her new novel.

I thought I’d never write fiction.

I grew up a child of fabulists, exaggerators, tall taletellers, fibbers, fabricators, and downright liars. Mom and Dad were both comfortable with alternate realities, quick to spin yarns when the real world didn’t suit their needs. I found this making up of stories utterly maddening — I clung to facts like a life raft — and when I discovered you could earn a paycheck writing true stories, I fell in love with journalism.

Yet, as every journalist, biographer, and historian know, truth shape-shifts greatly, depending on who’s telling the story. It was when Mom challenged me to tell the truth about my own story that the notion of “truth” got downright tricky. Incidents that I remembered as inspiring and heartwarming, my brother and sisters often found upsetting. Same facts, different stories. In The Glass Castle, I told the truth as best I could. My truth.

My next book, Half Broke Horses, was labeled a “true-life novel.” It was based on Mom’s mother, written in first person, largely from stories Mom told me, ones I couldn’t verify, stories with gaps. If it’s partly made up, it’s fiction. Same with The Silver Star, cobbled together from different stories I knew, that I had witnessed.

Still, I saw myself as a fact-gatherer. I didn’t make things up. I had no imagination. That’s what I told myself. That’s what I told interviewers. That’s what I told readers. It was a reader in Ohio who challenged me on this. “I believe you have a great imagination,” he gently said, “but you’re afraid of your own creativity.”

I stared at him, too gob smacked to react, but thinking, he might be onto something. And if he was right, could I possibly unleash this creativity beast?

There was a story that had long fascinated me. A woman, born into a powerful family but cast out. Underestimated. Because she was a woman. Because the circumstances of her birth were scandalous. I could set it during Prohibition, a period I was drawn to — but I wasn’t around to witness. Could I write a story that was largely made up, but had truth in it?

I explored this character but kept returning to my safe haven of facts. There were women moonshiners and I read everything I could find on them. Sadly, none I found kept diaries. I had to imagine the story. But a funny thing happened. My made-up character, Sallie Kincaid, began feeling real to me. I hope she will feel real to you, too. I’ve come to believe that the most powerful fiction is rooted in fact, that it has authenticity of nonfiction, while the nonfiction that most resonates has the texture and nuances of fiction.

I’m sure I have failed in places, that I will get scolding posts from sharp-eyed readers and history buffs. So be it. But my most ambitious hope for Hang the Moon is that you readers find a story that feels real, that transports you to an isolated part of America during a ridiculously contradictory period, a story that will help you understand why good people did bad things, that will get you to ask what you would have done if you were in Sallie Kincaid’s shoes. Only by looking at our pasts can we truly understand where we are now, and as important as it is to tell our own stories, it’s equally important to listen to other people’s stories. Now that’s the truth.