From sitcom-style funny to sober, from reportage to personal essays, Anne Fadiman treated her Russell House audience to a delightfully entertaining and enriching reading. Fadiman read Wednesday night as part of the Wesleyan Writing Program’s Distinguished Writers/New Voices program.
Fadiman is probably most renowned for her first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” which details the true story of an epileptic Hmong child and her family living in California. The book deals with the cross-cultural misunderstandings that occur when the family’s traditional methods of healing clash with modern medicine. The result is tragedy, as the book ends with the young protagonist in a vegetative state, suffering from irreparable brain damage.
The book took Fadiman eight years to write, and she was rewarded not only with a National Book Critics Circle award, but with gushing reviews from the Russell House audience during a question and answer session.
Fadiman began her lecture by talking about the roles of writing and editing in her own life.
“One of the great attractions of writing is you get to be the black sheep of the family,” she said. After observing that her own parents are both writers and editors she continued, “I didn’t get to be an iconoclast at all.”
Fadiman then read two sections from “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.” The first dealt with a Hmong boy explaining how to make fish soup, which represented a cultural tendency of the Hmong to tell stories in excessive detail. The second described a scene where the epileptic girl is very ill and her family sacrifices a pig, convinced their child is infested with a malevolent spirit.
Fadiman then read a selection of personal essays, which drew laughter and applause from the crowd.
“The ‘me’ in these personal essays was a me with all the foibles exaggerated, like a caricature with a big nose,” Fadiman said of the neurotic, compulsive persona she created in her essays.
The first essay described what happens when two writers get married and mix their personal libraries together. Fadiman read that her books were “rigidly regimented,” organized regionally and chronically, even though, as her more disorganized husband pointed out, no one really knows in what order Shakespeare wrote his plays. The audience greatly enjoyed this essay in particular and applauded at the end.
Then Fadiman read another humorous essay about a family trip to the country before returning to a more sober, serious mood with an essay about witnessing a boy drown during a canoe trip. She then took some questions from the audience talking about, among other subjects, her efforts in writing her reportage book, her use of humor, and how to deal with procrastination. The reading ended with applause and a book signing.
“I enjoyed Ms. Fadiman’s reading as I normally enjoy the readings in the Russell House,” said Sally Rosen ’08. “She has a distinguished outlook that’s useful for younger writers.”
“It’s interesting to see an author in person,” said graduate student Dan Brower. “It’s completely different from just reading the book. It’s a lot for fun, and you get a better understanding of her sense of humor. You get to see the author in a raw and unpolished state.”
Mingling during the book signing, most audience members agreed that the reading was surprisingly entertaining, not necessarily just for those with literary interests.
“That’s the point of the Distinguished Writer’s Serie—to connect with those who are not necessarily writers,” said Director of Writing Programs Anne Greene.
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