Published in 2012 (first published 1997)
368 pages
Anne Fadiman was born in New York City and raised in Connecticut and Los Angeles. After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a wilderness instructor in Wyoming before returning to New York to write. She has been a staff writer at Life, editor-at-large of Civilization, and editor of The American Scholar. Fadiman is also the author of two collections of personal essays, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, as well as the editor of Rereadings and Best American Essays 2003. She is married to the writer George Howe Colt. Fadiman lives with her family in western Massachusetts and serves as the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.
What is this book about?
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a sad, beautiful, complicated story that is ostensibly about a tragedy that arose from a clash of cultures, but is really about the tragedy of human beings.
Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: “What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance.” The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, “There are no villains in Fadiman’s tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.”
