Jeannette Walls, a contributor to MSNBC.com and author of “The Glass Castle: A Memoir” (Scribner), said her mother helped instill the love of books in her by bringing home “pillowcases of books for us to read.” At the Strand Bookstore last week, Ms. Walls read aloud from a book that influenced her greatly when she was 10 years old: Betty Smith’s classic novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” which describes a young girl’s poverty at the turn of the century.

She selected a passage from Smith’s novel that involved a neighborhood custom. As midnight on Christmas Eve approached, children gathered outside where Christmas trees remained unsold, volunteering to have trees thrown at them. If the children could remain standing under the impact of the blow, the tree was theirs to keep.

Continuing on the subject of trees, Ms. Walls recalled the time her mother made her father stop the car after seeing a Joshua tree leaning in the Mojave Desert. The wind had bent down the tree, yet its roots continued to hold it in place. Her mother said the beauty of the tree was its struggle.

Ms. Walls’s book has a passage about the December holidays. As a Christmas present, her father took each of her siblings one by one outside into the desert and told them, “Pick your favorite star.”

Her memoir describes her family’s nomadic life out West and return to a West Virginia mining town. Ms. Walls’s mother was an artist who craved excitement. Her eccentric father distrusted doctors enough to not take her brother to the hospital when he fell off the couch and cracked his head.

Ms. Walls learned from her father how to tap out Morse code messages “and how we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us.”

The family would pack up and leave on short notice: “Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end. That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people were tracking us looked in his ashtray, they’d find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him.”

Ms. Walls said her book begins with her in a taxi headed to a fancy party. On the way she sees her homeless mother going through a Dumpster. When she later asked her mother what she should tell people about her parents, and her mother replied: “Just tell the truth. That’s simple enough.” Ms. Walls then had to deal with questions like, “How can you let your mother live like that?”

One audience member asked about her family’s reaction to the book. She said her mother complained that she was a much better driver in real life.

She wrote the first draft in about six weeks but her editor found its voice emotionally distant: She had written it like a journalist, “as though it was happening to someone else.” She then took five years to “get inside” the head of the narrator, namely herself.

An older audience member in the front row, who knew a lot about films, compared “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” and Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper” as fine coming-of-age stories. He then asked the author about the movie version of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

She spoke of her inability to watch films of books she loves, such as “The Grapes of Wrath.” The voices and characters become personal to her upon reading these favorite books, and the films do not match up.

Ms. Walls said she has spoken at schools with economically disadvantaged students. The students open up, she said, by asking her questions such as what eating food out of trash cans is like.

She also spoke about being invited to speak at a Maryland school where students created an opera on homelessness. The class had been unable to find someone to speak on homelessness until one student, seeing Ms. Walls on “Primetime Live,” exclaimed, “That’s our woman!” They contacted her and she came to speak. She later received a quilt the students made from the opera costumes.

She said she feels that everyone has a secret or something they feel makes them odd or that sets them apart. She hid her own upbringing for many years. After writing the memoir, she felt she would lose her friends and become a pariah. “I was wrong,” she told the audience. “I underestimated other people’s capacity for compassion.”

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ROCK ‘N’ ROLL NEVER FORGETS

Chuck Klosterman is traversing the country on a book tour at the moment. He spoke Tuesday at Borders at the Time Warner Center and last week at a lunchtime program in Bryant Park.

His book, “Killing Yourself To Live: 85% of a True Story” (Scribner), is about his cross-country trip visiting sites connected with the deaths of rock ‘n’ rollers such as Sid Vicious and Buddy Holly. Mr. Klosterman said he traveled by car over 21 days. “Write an epic story,” he recalled his editor telling him. He wanted to see what going to those places felt like.

One of his discoveries was that the places were just places; Americans inject meaning into celebrities’ deaths. About the places where two Allman Brothers Band members died in separate accidents in Macon, Ga., he felt, when he got there, “It is just a road.”

The Knickerbocker asked Mr. Klosterman who his influences as a writer were. “I know who I’d like to have been influenced by,” he said brightly. “I’d love to have written a huge book like [David Foster Wallace’s] ‘Infinite Jest’ full of everything in 43 dense chapters.”

Mr. Klosterman’s speaking style resembles a self-questioning stand-up comedy monologue. He offered these thoughts on not living in the present: “Ever notice how you miss people more when you are with them – remembering why you like them around – than when they are gone?”