Theater video tags: 2010

Vaddey Ratner discusses In the Shadow of Banyan, a debut novel depicting her family's experience during the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. "I didn't want to write a memoir," she says. "What I wanted was to honor the lives lost, those who perished, and I wanted to do so through my endeavor to transorm personal pain with art." In the Shadow of Banyan will be published by Simon & Schuster in July.

Earlier this month Random House published the paperback edition of Let's Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell's memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story (The Dial Press, 1996), who died of lung cancer at age forty-two in 2002.

The award-winning author most recently of Solar (Nan A. Talese, 2010) describes how he develops ideas and finds inspiration for his writing. "I do a lot of hiking," he says, "and the rhythm of walking is very amenable...to the rhythm of thinking."

"Just because it happened doesn't make it interesting." Author and teacher Marion Roach Smith offers this and other priceless nuggets of advice for anyone thinking of writing a memoir in The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on June 9.