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Anne Fadiman

 Anne Fadiman has written about Coleridge, about a Hmong community in America, about "them" as a singular pronoun with unknown antecedent, and about the habit of annotating books. She understands that a writer needs to "seduce" a reader. So one of her essays begins in this way:


It was a late afternoon in November, and I was hosting a college talk by Mark Helprin. During the Q&A, Helprin told the assembled students that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible.

A student stood up. Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy. She asked Helprin if he really meant that. There was a collective intake of breath in the room. It was what everyone else had been thinking but no one had been brave or brazen enough to say...

What follows is a twin portrait. Ostensibly, Fadiman is writing about an impressive student. But--really--she is writing about herself. It's clear that she is tied to her student (Marina). When Marina scolds herself about "too much anaphora," you can detect the undercurrent of Fadiman's empathy/self-recognition.

Additionally, Fadiman feels shocked and challenged by Marina: this is evident through Fadiman's allusions to mini-skirts, which are sometimes "exiguous" and sometimes "flagrantly short."

The tension between Fadiman and Marina Keegan is immediately engaging--and it leads to a "photo finish," surprising and inevitable.

Fadiman's new book is "Frog and Other Essays"--and I'm enjoying it.
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