Photo by Betsy Bethel Jeannette Walls, author of the memoir “The Glass Castle” poses in the living room of the Liberty Oaks guest house at West Liberty Univeristy during an interview Thursday morning.

WEST LIBERTY — “The Glass Castle” author Jeannette Walls had nearly made it to West Liberty University from her Charlottesville, Va., horse farm Wednesday night when she got lost. Her GPS had led her astray, and a “very nice” man on Table Rock Lane pointed her in the right direction. Then someone came out from West Liberty to lead her to campus, where she was staying prior to giving the Hughes Lecture Thursday night.

It was her latest lesson in learning to accept help from others, she said during an interview at the Liberty Oaks guest house Thursday morning.

“It’s a big part of my identity, that I don’t need help,” noted the former New York City journalist and gossip columnist whose memoir about her childhood growing up poor and hungry in the desert Southwest and southern West Virginia was made into a movie last year starring Woody Harrelson.

She came by her independence honestly, forced to fend off starvation, bullies, sexual attacks and even her own parents, an intelligent alcoholic father and a nonconformist artist mother whose parenting methods, however well intentioned, often were abusive or, at the least, neglectful. She said she never felt unloved, however, and that meant “everything.”

To some readers, her childhood was horrific. Her sisters view it as painful; her brother makes jokes about it. To her, it was singular, defining, instructive.

She accidentally set herself on fire cooking hot dogs at age 3, suffering burns that required skin grafts. When there was nothing else to eat, she rooted through garbage cans, shared a sugar-coated stick of margarine with her sister and stole out of her classmates’ lunches during recess to keep from starving.

Then there was the time her father “taught” her to swim by throwing her in the deepest part of a sulfur spring over and over, moving away from her as she choked and flailed and eventually made it to safety. He said he wouldn’t be doing her any favors by saving her. Instead of hating him for it, she took the lesson to heart.

Nevertheless, at 17, she escaped the cold, leaking, crumbling shack in a Welch, W.Va., holler and moved to New York with her older sister. There, being aggressive, rigid and “pathologically independent” served her well, propelling her up the social ladder. But for many years, she hid her past.

When she finally decided to tell all in her memoir, she wrote the first version in six weeks, but it was stilted and sterile, as if it happened to someone else.

It was her second husband, former journalist John Taylor, the son of a wealthy diplomat, who got her to dig deeper. At one point, he asked her how she kept from starving.

“I said, ‘You know, I’m resourceful,’ and he said, ‘No, I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘There is no way I’m going to talk about rooting in the garbage. No. I’m not going to do it!’ He said, ‘If you’re going to tell the truth, you have to tell the truth.'”

She said it took her five more years to rewrite the book. She wrote the scene about eating out of the garbage 19 times.

“I was so ashamed,” she said. “But you know, it’s the funniest thing, it doesn’t bother me now. It just doesn’t.”

While she spent her childhood constantly doing “the skedaddle” — the term her father used for skipping town to avoid bill collectors, child protection workers or the police — and she spent her early adulthood on the lam from her past, when she finally stopped and faced her demons, she felt freer than she ever had.

“A wise man said to me secrets are a little bit like vampires. They suck the life out of you, but they can exist only in the darkness. Once they’re exposed to the light, there’s a moment of horror, but then, poof, they lose their power over you,” she said.

She has come to accept her parents and her past and feels that the resourcefulness she developed was a gift.

“It’s just something that happened to me. It’s not a reflection of me, and if it is a reflection of me, it’s a reflection of my resourcefulness. … We carry around this guilt and shame. Why? Because you went through something tough, that doesn’t make you a bad person.”

That resourcefulness, however, led to her belief she didn’t need anyone’s help. It’s something she’s still working on.

“I will always have issues. I am pathologically independent.” Her husband has been a true partner who has helped her see the value in accepting assistance.

“You don’t want to show vulnerability, but the smartest people out there are quick to admit when they need help,” she said.

While she had the “sharp elbows” she needed for living in New York City, she and Taylor moved to a horse farm in central Virginia about 10 years ago, and she said: “You couldn’t pay me to move back to New York.”

“I’m just stunned at how beautiful my life is now.” She was shocked the first time someone let her car pull out in front of them. She knows the grocery store employees by name. “It’s a beautiful way of life, and I just didn’t expect it.”

She recently finished her fourth book, a work of historical fiction set in Virginia during Prohibition. It has required painstaking research, she said, to ensure her characters are saying and doing things that people during the 1920s actually would say and do.

“Fiction that doesn’t ring true to me, I just throw it out the window. It makes me nuts. … It has to feel real. It has to feel true.”

FILM NOTES

Of the film, starring Brie Larson as Jeannette Walls, Naomi Watts as her mother and Harrelson as her father, Walls said she was impressed at the lengths to which they and the director — who also was the screenwriter — went to be true to her story.

“I love the film. I loved it!” she said.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton had read the book several times and felt the relationship between Walls and her father, Rex, was the heart of the story. He focused on it, which meant other characters, including her mother, Rose Mary, didn’t get as much play, which didn’t sit well with some critics.

“When all was said and done, I was blown away by how passionate they were about authenticity. They couldn’t tell everything, but what they did tell they were so concerned about getting it right, emotionally, visually, on so many levels. … Every single thing they did they consulted me on.”

She said they used some of her mother’s artwork in the film; Larson wore some of her clothes; and, they even made a song using lyrics from her father’s award-winning poem he wrote while a student at Welch High School.

“I started crying the first time I heard it,” she said.

Harrelson, she said, wanted to know such details about her father as the way he held his hands while talking and the way he walked.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to impersonate him, I want to become him.'”

Of the portrayal, she said he “really got it.”

When the cast and crew descended on Welch, in McDowell County, the director “fell in love with it,” she said. He was thrilled to discover the Welch Daily News building where Walls had worked as a teen still standing, with the printing press still looming in the basement. He filmed it.

A former classmate of hers from Welch is the coach of the high school cheering squad today. She had circa-1970s outfits created in the school’s former colors to be used in the movie.

“How can you not love this movie?!” she said.