Jeanette Walls, author of “The Glass Castle,” will deliver Alma Mater Production’s annual Atwater Lecture at William & Mary.

The event, which starts at 7 p.m. March 26 in the Sadler Center’s Commonwealth Auditorium, is free for students, faculty and staff with free admission for the general public on a first come, first seated basis. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The first 80 students will receive a free copy of The Glass Castle, Walls’ best-selling memoir. Walls will hold a book signing after the event in the Tidewater room.

Walls is widely known for “The Glass Castle,” which spent over 400 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after its 2005 release. A film of the same title starring Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson debuted in 2017. She is also the author of “Half Broke Horses,” and other well-received novels. 

Walls’ talk, “The Glass Castle: Demon Hunting and Other Life Lessons,” will cover her tumultuous childhood and how she had to confront her past to overcome deep-seated fears. 

Walls, who now lives in northern Virginia, grew up in the 1960s in the American West, one of four children in a family strapped for cash and constantly on the move, outrunning debtors. Her loving but erratic parents had unconventional ideas about child-raising, some of which put Walls and her siblings in peril. In her memoir, she explains how she worked to turn resentment into love and confusion into understanding.  “Our flaws can be our greatest assets,” she said. 

After surviving periods of homelessness, Walls moved to New York to live with her older sister and worked odd jobs while using grants, loans and scholarships to attend Barnard College. She graduated with honors in 1984.

For the next two decades, she worked for various New York publications, specializing in gossip. She wrote the “Intelligencer” column for New York magazine, a gossip column for Esquire and regularly contributed to “Scoop” at MSNBC.com.

Since the phenomenal success of the memoir, one thing she has learned is, “We all have more in common than we think,” she said. Her message to audiences is to be honest with themselves about whatever their own trauma may be, and “work to move beyond it.”

A lifelong reader, Walls also has strong feelings about movements to ban books, including her own.  

The event is sponsored by AMP and made possible with generous support from the Janet and Peter Atwater Lecture Endowment.