Jeannette Walls

Since this assignment forces us to pick our favorite non-fiction writer, I guess I’ll go with Jeannette Walls.
Jeannette writes with a straight-forwardness that allows you to focus on what she is saying, not the way she is saying it. There are no flowery descriptions or epic metaphors. She is honest, and at times dismisses the descriptions of emotions; she realizes the readers will be able to infer such things using her anecdote and empathy.
The night before we had to leave the cabin, I couldn’t sleep. I know Anna couldn’t either; I could hear her rustling in the bunk above me. It was hot and sticky, and we dozed with our blankets thrown on the floor.
“Beth, I can’t sleep,” I heard Anna mumble around one o’clock. There was light from the other side of the curtain that connected our small bedroom to the main room. We could hear my dad mumbling about not wanting to leave, and Luke finishing packing his bag.
I got out of my lower bunk and pushed the curtain aside, and walked out to my dad double-checking something in his bag. He looked up at me, brow furrowed.
“What are you still doing up?”
Anna emerged from the curtain next to me, and gave my dad a small smile.
“We couldn’t sleep.”
He sighed and turned around. Luke was sitting on the red futon, watching some South Park episode. Amy was buried in some fantasy novel that sleep couldn’t compete with.
He looked back at us and sighed again. “Everyone in the kitchen. Help me make sandwiches for tomorrow.”
In our pajamas we trudged into the kitchen. Dad put us to work at an assembly line, cutting the bread and putting chicken in it, and finally putting it into baggies. We were silent. When we finished, our dad told us we had to go back to bed, but first we had to end with a happy memory. He opened the door and we walked out onto our porch and in the grass.
It was dark. We were miles outside of the nearest incorporated town of 2514, and the light pollution was non-existent. We looked up and the sky was clear of clouds with millions of stars lighting up the sky. It took a few minutes for your eyes to adjust, and then you realized there was another layer, more stars than you could ever imagine. We stumbled around with our faces turned up to the heavens, laughing about how dizzy we felt. We laid down in the grass and our dad pointed out the silvery milky way.
Eventually we stumbled off to bed since we had to make the twelve hour drive home the next day. “But at least,” my dad would say, “we made some happy memories.”