Jeannette Walls · 2005 · road

Jeannette Walls's memoir of a nomadic childhood: brilliant, unreliable parents moving the family through the desert towns of the Southwest a step ahead of the bills, camping in the open, then years of poverty in an Appalachian coal town, before the children escape one by one to New York.

1. 1
   Phoenix

   Where Jeannette is born and the family keeps landing between flights. Rex works, briefly; the desert around it is where they camp when the money and the jobs run out.

2. 2
   Las Vegas

   An early stop on the family's restless loop through the Southwest, Rex chasing a system to beat the casinos while the children are left to fend for themselves.

3. 3
   San Francisco

   A spell in a Tenderloin hotel that ends when it burns. The Walls parents call these abrupt departures the skedaddle - always a step ahead of the bills and the authorities.

4. 4
   Blythe

   A desert town on the California-Arizona line where Maureen is born and the children briefly go to school, before the next move is forced on them.

5. 5
   Battle Mountain

   A deserted railway depot in the Nevada desert, no running water, the children riding in the back of a U-Haul to get there. Foraging, trapping and self-schooling fill these years.

6. 6
   Phoenix

   A return south to Grandma's house - a rare stretch of stability, the kids back in school and Rex working, before the pull of the road takes hold again.

7. 7
   Welch

   Rex's Appalachian hometown in the West Virginia coalfields, a three-room house without plumbing or heat. Years of hunger, cold and neglect - the hardest stretch of the childhood.

8. 8
   New York City

   Jeannette follows her sister Lori north at seventeen, finishing school and building the life the road never allowed. Her parents drift here too, and into homelessness.