Celeb Writer Reconciles With Humble Past

March 10, 2005 — -- Jeannette Walls has been described as the entertainment reporter with her own movie star looks. She has been a writer for New York magazine and Esquire, and she and her husband, writer John Taylor, are regarded as one of New York's power couples.

Walls travels effortlessly among the glitterati and during her career has shared some of their secrets with the world. But for years she also held a dramatic secret of her own: that she grew up very different from the people she now works and socializes with.

Her mother once lived on the streets and in abandoned buildings, and Walls' childhood was nomadic and poverty-stricken.

"I really believed that if people knew the truth about me, that I would be a pariah," Walls told ABC News' John Quiñones. "It's something that I just fought very hard to keep secret."

One night, Walls was in a taxi going to a fancy party. "I looked out the window and I saw my mother. She was rooting through a Dumpster, and I was so ashamed I ducked into the back of the taxi so that she wouldn't see me," she said.

Walls went home later that evening, hating what she had become. "I looked in the mirror and I thought, 'What has happened to me?'"

Despite the shame she had, Walls says her early childhood was happy, and at the time, she didn't think of her family as homeless.

"We slept out in the desert. We slept in the mountains. We might have been called homeless because we didn't have a home, but I would have never thought of us that way. We lived in our car, we lived wherever we could," she said.

Walls' parents, Rex and Rose Mary, were both unconventional, somewhat eccentric souls who cherished freedom. Rose Mary, college-educated, had a passion for excitement and painting. Rex was a self-taught, "brilliant" man, Walls said -- who also had a penchant for the bottle.

There are times their family -- which eventually grew to six -- slept in cardboard boxes, but she thought it was "cool," Walls said. "My mother told me it was an adventure and I believed her," she said.