Writing Family History with Jeremy Harding, John Lanchester, Nicholas Spice and Mary-Kay Wilmers

How do writers investigate their own pasts and shape them into a narrative, one which other people will find interesting? What are the particular pleasures, and pitfalls, of this kind of writing? Nicholas Spice, the publisher of The London Review of Books, chaired a discussion with Jeremy Harding, the author of the memoir Mother Country; John Lanchester, the author of Family Romance; and Mary-Kay Wilmers, the paper’s editor, whose book The Eitingons was published in 2009.