How Jeannette Walls Spins Good Stories Out of Bad Memories Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times Walls and her mother, Rose Mary, in the cottage on Walls's farm where Rose Mary lives. When it comes to branding - the kind that marks you for life - corporations have nothing on families. Jeannette Walls's mother branded her children this way: Lori, the oldest, was the smart one. Maureen, the youngest, was the pretty one. Brian, the boy, was the brave one. And Jeannette? "The only thing going for you," her mother informed her, "was that you worked hard." As I drove onto Walls's 205-acre farm in Virginia and the Technicolor green grass and trees unfurled to reveal horses in their paddocks, it seemed clear that hard work had lost its power as a put-down. When Walls published her memoir, "The Glass Castle," in 2005, it became an instant classic. It tells the story of her outrageous upbringing by Rex, her alcoholic father who was probably bipolar, and Rose Mary, her mother, a self-described "excitement addict" who is a hoarder and also probably bipolar. The book has sold 4.2 million copies and been translated into 31 languages. Hollywood has threatened a movie version for years; Jennifer Lawrence was recently announced to play Walls. No one ever uses the front door! Walls called, tearing out from behind the house. She is almost six feet tall, whippet thin, with a mane of dark red hair, wild at the possibility that I might enter her home the wrong way. Given her background, it's no surprise that her default instinct is to impose order. Walls's childhood was peripatetic, to say the least - her parents had 27 addresses in the first five years of their marriage. They were not only running out on the rent, but her father was convinced that the F.B.I. was after them. They finally landed in Rex's Appalachian hometown, Welch, W.Va., in a three-room house without plumbing or heat, infested with snakes and rats. Walls says she still has nightmares about the yellow bucket the six of them used each night as a toilet. "The Glass Castle," beautifully written in deceptively simple prose, gets its name from the dream house Rex promised to build his family. He drew up the blueprints; he just needed to discover gold so he could pay for it. Here's how the book begins: At 3, Walls is on a chair in front of the stove in the family's trailer, boiling hot dogs, because her mother is painting and can't be bothered to cook. Walls's pink-tutu dress catches fire, and her stomach, ribs and chest are badly burned. She is hospitalized for six weeks, until her father, irritated with the uppity doctors, breaks her out and takes her home. When she returns to the chair to cook more hot dogs, her mother says to her approvingly: "Good for you. You've got to get right back in the saddle. Then she continues painting. As Walls, 53, led me around back, the right way, into her tastefully restored farmhouse - salvaged pine floors, soapstone counters, wood-burning fireplaces - she chatted nonstop. That antic energy suited her well for the 29 years she lived in New York, having fled Welch at 17, to join Lori in the Bronx (Brian and Maureen came later). She finished high school in the city, and with grants, loans, scholarships and a year spent answering phones at a Wall Street law firm, put herself through Barnard. Rex contributed $950 and a mink coat that he won at poker. In 1987, at 27, Walls took over the Intelligencer gossip column at New York magazine, and later covered gossip for msnbc.com. She was married to an entrepreneur for eight years and lived on Park Avenue. Life was good, except that Rex and Rose Mary had followed their children to New York. Homeless at first, her parents eventually became squatters. While Walls wrote about "the skinny dames and the fat cats," as her father called them, she was careful to hide her background, though her parents kept turning up on the local news, mouthing off about squatters" rights. Then she published an inflammatory item concerning Scientology and learned that the church was beginning an investigation into her life. That, combined with a cab ride one night when she caught sight of her mother rooting through a Dumpster, made her decide it was time to tell the truth. After "The Glass Castle," Walls wrote "Half-Broke Horses," based on her maternal grandmother's life in the West and marketed as fiction. "The Silver Star," to be published on June 11, is actually her first novel. But beyond discussing the books, I was curious to see how Walls survived a childhood that would have flattened most people. As we sat in the kitchen, she continued her animated monologue, punctuated by frequent bursts of laughter. At the fourth mention of her mother, I realized this was the source of her anxi­ety; I would soon be meeting Rose Mary, who lives in a cottage on the farm. She is more of a conundrum than Rex, who died in 1994, at 59. Even though in "The Glass Castle" Jeannette writes about his stealing her piggy-bank savings to buy booze, she had a special relationship with him that she believes gave her the confidence to succeed. Rose Mary is more of an opaque figure; laser-sharp one day, maddeningly obtuse the next. Not to mention stunningly selfish. Once, when her children went hungry, as they often did, she saved a Hershey bar for herself. Readers were ready to crucify her for that alone, so I could understand her daughter's trepidation. Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine. Her most recent book is ""All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother's Dementia. With Refreshments."" Editor: Sheila Glaser