Genre: Biography and Memoir
Screening Room: Family Pictures
Details: Alan Lightman's grandfather, M. A. Lightman, was the family's undisputed patriarch: it was his movie theater empire that catapulted the family to prominence. His fearless success both galvanized and paralyzed his descendants, haunting them for a half-century after his death. Lightman writes about returning to Memphis in an attempt to understand the people he so eagerly left behind forty years earlier.