Meg Tilley speaks to young readers about her novels at Brookbanks Library in Toronto

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR

With silver threads in her dark hair and no makeup, Meg Tilly at 47 is as far from the Hollywood ingénue she once was as she is from the vulnerable young girl who was abused by her stepfather, her mother's lover and a family member.

It's no surprise that such a life fuels the fiction she's driven to write.

"I write all the time now, pretty much every day. I've been given" – she pauses to correct herself – "I've given myself the right to my words in a really big way."

But writing also feels, she says, "like a giving back."

While writing Porcupine, her first novel for young adults, she was "picturing girls like me at that age.

"It felt like, `Here, honey,'" she leans forward, cupping her hands in a gesture of offering.

The author was in Toronto this week reading from Porcupine.

When she read to a Grade 5 class in Calgary recently, she says, "It was one of the happiest days I've ever had, how they were so engrossed, these little faces, and then putting little life lessons in my talk, all the things that kind of saved me."

It only adds to her pleasure that these kids know her only as a writer, not as an Oscar-nominated actress.

Porcupine is about Jack, a feisty, 12-year-old Newfoundland girl whose military dad is killed in Afghanistan. When her weak and careless mother leaves Jacqueline and her younger siblings to live with a tough old bird of a great-grandmother on a hardscrabble prairie farm, Jack struggles to survive abandonment and find joy.

"With Porcupine, what I wanted is for girls who are in situations like that, who feel let down or abandoned, to know that you can look inside and get strong in yourself," she says.

Adults who disappoint and betray are a recurring theme in Tilly's writing. More than a decade after her first book, Singing Songs, was released as fiction, Tilly admitted it wasn't fiction at all.

It was "based on my life," she confessed last year, with the publication of her second book, Gemma, about a sexual predator.

"I wanted people to know why I wrote it and what my experience was," she says about Gemma. "I wanted people to know what it's like to be trapped with someone like this." Whether through the catharsis of writing or finding serenity in motherhood and maturity, Tilley is able to reconcile the betrayal and weakness of people you love and who love you.

"That's part of life," she says pragmatically. "There's always people who disappoint you or let you down but the fact is people do the best they can with whatever tools they're given."

She's obviously still conflicted about her mother, relating a telling anecdote about their relationship that she then asks to retract. "I don't want my mom to feel like a bad person," she explains.

Tilly is now on good terms with most of her large family, including eight siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings, after some friction and outright hostility following the publication of her novels about abuse. But she is reluctant to publish the many other manuscripts she's completed because, she says, "people in them are still alive."

It was her own children, Tilly says, who changed her life. "I grew up a lot," she says. "At first, I was still trying to be the person, to make the shape the outside world told me to be. Teaching my children to stand tall, and that they had a right to defend their bodies, and to pick their words, you think, how can I ask this of them if I can't do it myself?"

Motherhood also motivated her to turn her back on Hollywood and raise her children in British Columbia, where she'd grown up.

She feels no urge to return to acting. Offered a movie role recently, she confides, "I thought, `Eeew, I don't think so' – but I can't say never because you never know. I used to say I'd never get married again and here I am, married."

Still, Tilly is comfortable with her 17-year-old son, Will, wanting to become an actor like his father, Colin Firth, who lived with Tilly in British Columbia for several years after they made Valmont together and before he became a heartthrob as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones's Diary.

"He is very talented," she says with a measure of pride about her son.

He does complain about not being allowed to see his mother's movies. `` I have a rule that you can't see my stuff until you're 18. Because parents already cast such a big shadow in their children's lives. If you see them on a screen, there's such worship of that kind of thing."

She warned her older children, "If you don't want to see me naked, don't rent Girl on a Swing, because I did that for no money because I believed in the material, but it's not a very good movie."

These days, Tilly is revealing much more than she did in that movie.

LIFE IN PROGRESS

Born Margaret Chan, third of four children, to Patricia Ann Tilly and Harry Chan on Feb. 14, 1960, in Long Beach, Calif.

Parents divorced when she was 3 and she was raised by her mother and stepfather in British Columbia, graduating from high school in Victoria.

A serious ballet student and aspiring dancer, she made her screen debut in Fame in 1980.

Injury forced her to give up dance but her acting career led to roles on Hill Street Blues, The Big Chill and, in 1986, Agnes of God, for which she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared in Valmont, The Two Jakes, Girl on a Swing, Leaving Normal and Body Snatchers.

Now married for the third time, to a man she met in a writing workshop, she has three children: Emily (1984) and David (1986) from her marriage to film producer Tim Zinneman, which ended in 1989, and Will (1990) from her five-year relationship with actor Colin Firth. She was also married from 1995 to 2002 to John Calley, former president of Sony Pictures. Published her first autobiographical novel, Singing Songs, in 1994; Gemma in 2006; just published young adult novel, Porcupine.

Find out more about her at officialmegtilly.com.

Meg Tilly's novels have a common theme of adults who disappoint and betray

His brooding performance is taking the country (Australia) by storm, but for one woman, it's just a sad reminder of a lost love.

As TV's proud but irresistible Mr Darcy, he has every woman longing to fall into his arms. But for actress Meg Tilly, Pride And Prejudice hunk Colin Firth was the true love who slipped from her grasp. For six years, dashing Colin captivated petite, almond-eyed Meg's heart and they shared an idyllic life in wilderness country where they produced an adored son. The couple seemed assured an ending as happy as that of the characters in the BBC production of Jane Austen's classic love story.

But today, the 36-year-old star of The Big Chill can still barely bring herself to discuss how their blissful love affair fell apart two years ago, under the strain of conflicting career schedules. Since parting from her true love, Meg admits she has failed to find any man to soothe the pain.

But friends of Meg, who has the pale, delicate beauty of a real-life Elizabeth Bennet, says the Golden Globe winner was "crushed" when Colin quietly told her their relationship was over. They say she had broken her own golden rule of never getting involved with her leading men, when she fell for his charms as another dashing romantic figure, in the movie Valmont.

Nowadays, Colin is an "involved father" says Meg, who gave birth to their son, Will, five years ago. Colin is an infrequent visitor to her remote Vancouver home but she allows Will to visit his dad in England.

Meg admits single motherhood has had its share of ups and downs. "There we times when everybody in the house has the flu. You're cleaning up vomit and it's two in the morning,

and you're wishing there was somebody else there to help you," she says.