After a bout with thyroid cancer, Ebert, 69, no longer has the ability to speak. He remains a prolific writer, however, and a voracious user of social media. The Canadian Press emailed Ebert a list of questions about his new book. Here are the responses.

CP: In the book, you recall some of the things you've done and the places you've been with incredible accuracy. You say that when you were ill and bed-ridden, you started walking around London "in your mind," picturing the streets you'd turn down and the roast turkey and peaches you'd order during such an outing. Was that process part of why you wrote this book and how did it jog your memory?

RE: Not being able to speak, I found myself stuck inside my memories, and I was surprised how many and vivid they were. Before I got sick, I was much more outer-directed and didn't realize how much stuff was squirrelled away in there.

CP: You paint some very vivid pictures - from an exact description of how your beloved Steak 'n Shake burgers are made, to what it was like to work in a newsroom in the 1960s and '70s. It sounds like it must have been a lot of fun revisiting some of the things you've done - can you talk a bit about your writing process, including how you decided what to leave in and take out?

RE: There could have been a great deal more about movies, but I didn't want to write a movie book. I was more interested in the mysteries of life, especially after cancer changed my life so dramatically and forced me to confront my mortality.

CP: Can you talk a bit about the way you pieced this together - did you work from journals? Interviews with family members?

RE: I worked entirely between my head and the keyboard. No journals. Some old family photo albums helped a little, and many of those photos are in the book. Basically I wanted to explore a midwestern boyhood and the unexpected paths it found.

CP: You also write about some of the amazing places you've visited and your compulsion to return to the same spots, the exact cafe, even the exact table. Your wife, Chaz, calls it "touching your bases." You say it's a way to "measure the wheel of the years." Can you elaborate on that?

RE: I sit in a particular cafe, or sprawl on the grass in a particular park, or read a newspaper in a particular greasy spoon, and say, "I've done this before, I'm doing it now, I will do it again." It was pretending immortality. Now I've touched a lot of those bases for the last time. After one of our vacations in London, a friend asked Chaz, "what did you see?" She said, "We saw the places Roger saw on his previous trips to London." She used to joke that it was hard to get me to do something the first time, and then impossible to get me to stop doing it.

CP: You didn't set out to be a movie reviewer, you wanted to be an op-ed columnist and then a novelist. You say in the book that your 1967 reviews are written in much the same style as today. Why do you think your style hasn't changed?

RE: I always write subjectively, in the first person. My writing isn't formal, as based on theory. It's my voice.

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