For two decades Jeannette Walls hid her roots - working primarily as a gossip columnist at several publications including Esquire and USA Today, and as a contributor to MSNBC.  She even wrote a book about gossip, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip (1999) - described by Publishers Weekly as 'provocative and invariably entertaining, Walls gives dishing the dirt its historical, social and political due.'

Then cracks started to appear in her version of her life and she found herself compelled to tell it how it really was.  She dedicates her book to her husband John, 'for convincing me that everyone who is interesting has a past'.