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Alan Lightman talks about his Memphis memoir, Screening Room

In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—already a poet, novelist, playwright, and theoretical physicist—turns to memoir in telling the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, and it includes scenes with Memphis luminaries like Elvis and Boss Crump, but it is also wholly the story of Lightman himself as he struggles to understand his own place as a white, Jewish man in the segregated South.

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