November 15, 2004 -- If you're a gossip columnist without a book deal
these days, you might as well just kill yourself. Oh shit - that's me.
Jeannette Walls, our favorite red-headed menace, who writes The Scoop column at msnbc.com is publishing a memoir with Scribner in April called "The Glass Castle".
Unlike her 2000 book "Dish: The inside Story on the World of Gossip",
in which she famously outed Matt Drudge, "Glass Castle" is not about
the world of gossip. It's the story of Walls' upbringing at the hands
of a couple of drunken, destitute, "dangerously irresponsible" yet, er,
"uniquely creative" bohemians who ended up homeless while Walls and her
siblings prospered.
Personal memoir or no, Walls' book is likely to be lumped in with that of grandmère of gossip Liz Smith, whose own book "Dishing: Great Dishes - And Dish - From America's Most Beloved Gossip Columnist"
has now been moved to April as well by Simon & Schuster. Originally
set to come out last month, Smith's book is about celebrity eating
habits, as far as we can tell.
Meanwhile, the younger generation of gossips is hard at work on
semi-autobiographical novels about working at Page Six. Transgressive
tough guy Ian Spiegelman's book, being published by Miramax Books, will
no doubt be the first in print and the hardest-hitting. New York
magazine's Deborah Schoeneman is retiring to Moby's house in the Hudson
Valley soon to work on hers. And current Page Sixer Paula Froelich was
floating a proposal of her own a while back, we hear.
