"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.
By Fergus Greer"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.
1. Did you marry a Greek-American so you can vacation there?"That's right. All part of the grand plan!"2. It says here that you write with "a deep compassion for human imperfection." Do you relate?
(Laughs) "I think it's impossible to be human and not relate to that. Absolutely. We're all pretty flawed, but that's what makes us interesting." 3. In these tales, you follow a Los Angeles family through everyday life. Could that family sometimes be yours?
"No, they're very different from mine, although I do have a daughter and a husband. But no, fortunately it's not my family!"4. Writing is so solitary, the opposite of being on stage. What's harder, acting or writing?
Writing. I started acting as a child. It was very instinctive. In many ways children are the best actors. It just flows and it's natural. Writing is, like you say, very solitary. It's hard.5. Do you write these stories thinking they could be turned into a movie or play?
"I didn't when I was writing it. To write a novel just to be turned into a screenplay, you're cheating the art form. However, now I am thinking about it, but I also know that it's going to have to change quite a bit."
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--RIP David Rakoff: David Rakoff, essayist, humorist and radio personality known for his work on This American Life, has died at 47. He was being treated for cancer. He wrote three books, Don't Get Too Comfortable, Fraud and Half Empty, which won the 2011 Thurber Prize, and had delivered a novel entitled Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish, which Doubleday plans to publish posthumously in 2013.
We have a new Twitter-fueled uproar today. Why is bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis claiming TV actor Matt Bomer is "too gay" to play a straight role in a movie of Fifty Shades of Grey?
"He's NOT right for Christian G," he tweeted Wednesday. "Okay I'll say it. Matt Bomer isn't right for Christian Grey because he is openly gay...He's not CG. Never...I am NOT discriminating Matt Bomer because of his sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women. Get it?!?"
Left by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
Although In the Shadow of the Banyan is inspired by her childhood, Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Her goal wasn't to provide journalistic evidence of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, where it is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed 1 million to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979.Rather, it was personal. "This book allows me to save my family, to immortalize them, to bring them back to life, for me to eternalize them," Ratner says.Most of all, it brings back her adored father. At age 5, Ratner saw him led away by soldiers. When, where and how he was killed, no one knows.Narrated by 7-year-old Raami, Banyan opens in magical luxury. Servants bustle about the Phnom Penh estate — the old gardener putting lotus flowers in iced water to stay fresh; Raami's nanny, her "milk mother," nagging her to get ready to dine with her grandmother, a high princess. (Like the author, Raami is connected to Cambodia's complicated royal bloodlines but not in line to inherit the throne.)Meanwhile, explosions can be heard outside as the Khmer Rouge circle the doomed city.Ratner opened her novel with a scene of peace "so you can see the beauty that is struggling to exist amid this war." Soon Raami and her family — mother, father, grandmother, aunts, uncles and baby sister — are forced at gunpoint to leave for the countryside. Because her father is a prince, he is targeted by the Communists trying to create a classless, self-sufficient, agrarian society. Raami witnesses the result: death, terror and starvation. Writing "an imaginative narrative" allowed Ratner to change details such as the narrator's age. Asked how a 5-year-old could remember so much, Ratner explains that her memories of her father were particularly strong because of the polio she suffered as an infant.Today, Ratner walks with a limp, but as a baby, the handicap was "devastating" in a culture that prized "physical perfection."Instead of shunning her and her metal leg brace, her father — a royal who had married a commoner — spent an enormous amount of time with Ratner. "He was always talking to me," she says. Ratner's ability to speak vanished for a period. She was mute when she and her mother escaped from Cambodia. (Ratner's baby sister died of malaria.) After two years in refugee camps, they came to the USA in 1981. Speaking no English when she arrived at age 11, Ratner went on to become her high school's valedictorian. She met and married her American husband — today an environmental expert — at Carleton College and later graduated from Cornell.Cambodia today is very different from the country Ratner fled. There is a king again — one of Ratner's relatives. Ratner lived in Cambodia from 2005 to 2009 when her husband was working for an environmental think tank.Although she didn't complete the manuscript and find an agent until she was an adult, Ratner says that "even as a little girl, I always knew I had to tell about living through this ordeal."I need the world to remember."For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com. 
Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:
This Is How It Ends
By David Carson, For USA TODAYCelebrated food visionary Julia Child in her kitchen at her home in Cambridge, Mass. in 1996.WASHINGTON – Like a fine wine, which she was known to enjoy, Julia Child is aging well.
By Jym Wilson,, USA TODAY
Jonathan Wenk, Columbia PicturesMeryl Streep played Child in the 2009 hit film Julie & Julia, a movie that introduced Child to a whole new and younger generation. Pretense was not a word Child knew. Child summed up her remarkable life quite simply during an interview with the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in 1990: "I was the right person at the right time."That right time was the early 1960s, when Child returned from Paris — her husband Paul was in the Foreign Service— having learned the basics of French cooking. She decided to share those basics with an American public still feasting on frozen peas, starting with Mastering the Art of French Cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle in 1961.Her motto: learn techniques, forge ahead, never apologize and never, ever look back. And use butter, but in moderation."Her mantra of moderation was true," says chef Ris Lacoste, owner of RIS restaurant in Washington, who was a friend and feted Child on her 90th birthday in a PBS documentary. "She would have half a sundae. She'd cook salmon poached in vermouth but always have vegetables. She ate right and enjoyed life."She was as much a feminist as Betty Friedan, who was emerging as a social force at the same time, both telling women to take charge of their own lives. Child was a supporter of Planned Parenthood and was public about her breast cancer when she had a mastectomy in 1968.Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf for more than 50 years, says she, too, was in the right place at the right time. She and Child were like two peas in a pod."We had a very parallel awakening to what we loved and wanted to do," says Jones, who is in her late 80s and retired in Vermont. "But you have to act on it, and that's what we did."
Julia remains with Jones every day. She cooks in a kitchen where Child-inspired pegboard walls hold her pots and pans and where most everything is on open shelves. A Julia trademark. "So you can see if you're running out of lentils," Jones says.PBS, which Child called home for years beginning with The French Chef in 1963, is celebrating her 100th birthday online, through social media and on TV — early episodes will be aired during the celebration. Fans cooking their own versions of a Julia dish can share the experience through blogs on PBS Food and Twitter (#CookforJulia)."We're encouraging people to get into the kitchen and cook, which is exactly what Julia would have wanted," says PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger. There's even an app. A condensed version of Child's seminal cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Selected Recipes, is now available for download on the iPad, Nook Tablet and Nook Color by Barnes & Noble. Introductory price: $2.99. (List price is $4.99.) Child wrote or co-wrote 18 books — with sales totaling 6 million copies — including best sellers such as The Way to Cook (1989) and Baking With Julia (1996), according to publisher Knopf. Mastering the Art of French Cooking has sold more than 2 million copies alone.For those who have no desire to celebrate Julia by cooking, restaurants from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., to Le Coq au Vin in Orlando are celebrating with special Julia-inspired menus during Julia Child Restaurant Week, which begins today and runs through Aug. 15. It's all part of JC100, a 100-restaurant celebration of all things Julia. The anniversary has been a long time coming for Spitz, her biographer, who spent four years writing the newest homage to Child, rummaging through 86 boxes of her papers and writings stored at Harvard. He's participating in the celebration at the Smithsonian on Wednesday."I rank her as one of the great women of the 20th century, right along Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie O and Oprah," says Spitz, author of the 2006 best seller The Beatles. "This was a woman who not only changed how we eat but how we live. The food thing has evolved since her, but she lit the fuse, and the fireworks are still going off."A culinary revolutionaryTim Ryan, president of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., was a friend of Child's. She visited the school often, although she chided the institution for not having enough female students."Today there are dozens of cookbooks from notable chefs released every week. But back in '62 or so, that just wasn't the case. She was the pioneer there. It was a cookbook that had high aspirations, too," he says of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.Child was also a co-founder of the American Institute of Wine and Food 30 years ago. It now has 22 chapters with 3,000 members.Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant and owner of Clark Wolf Consulting, was in on AIWF's ground floor with her in the early '80s."She was always in the forefront," Wolf says. "She was a supporter of kids eating good food in school before there were such programs. It was about how to taste an apple, for instance. For Julia, it was all about learn, eat, share."And enjoy yourself in the process.The last meal Wolf had with Child was two months before she died. It was at a steakhouse in Santa Barbara, and she was in a wheelchair. "She wanted to go there because the waiters were all good-looking," Wolf says. "And so we went."For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.