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"  Part Inca, part Cherokee, the product of poverty and foster care in East Harlem, Emma has the perfect story for a great memoir. Except for one problem: None of it&amp;#039;s true. Incas actually call themselves Quechua, and she&amp;#039;s part Quechua only if mentoring &amp;quot;at-risk Latino youth&amp;quot; 10 hours a week makes her so. As her sister, Tess, points out, &amp;quot;I have a cleaning lady from Honduras but I remain Irish.&amp;quot;  That&amp;#039;s the delicious setup of Cusi Cram&amp;#039;s new play, A Lifetime Burning, which opens this month at Primary Stages in New York. And though Cram&amp;#039;s interest was spurred by the recent epidemic of fabricated memoirs, it&amp;#039;s really about what she calls a &amp;quot;privileged, navel-gazing society&amp;quot; that requires everyone to create a better story than the one they&amp;#039;re born with. For the sisters, that means rewriting themselves after the death of wealthy, overwhelming parents.  Cram, 41, says that&amp;#039;s the only autobiographical part of the play. She and her half sister, Kate, to whom A Lifetime Burning is dedicated, are the daughters of Lady Jeanne Campbell, a British noblewoman who led a fascinating life as a journalist, an actress, and a consort of famous men (Kate&amp;#039;s father was Norman Mailer). &amp;quot;Who are you when you are no longer the daughter of someone bigger than life?&amp;quot; Cram found herself asking when Campbell died in 2007. &amp;quot;And everyone&amp;#039;s parents are big in their own mythology.&amp;quot; But Cram knows there are different kinds of &amp;quot;big.&amp;quot; She spent her teens as a model and soap opera actress, a sometimes &amp;quot;creepy&amp;quot; experience that taught her &amp;quot;not to fall in love with being famous for the way you look.&amp;quot; Now, between plays, she writes for the children&amp;#039;s TV series Arthur and is working, inevitably, on what she refuses to call a memoir. Will truth have as satisfying a resolution as fiction? There&amp;#039;s reason to think so: Cusi means &amp;quot;happy&amp;quot;\u2014in Quechuan. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/reviews/a10252/a-lifetime-burning-333659/>