My conversation with Anne Fadiman…
I was fortunate last summer to speak with Anne Fadiman, author, essayist and someone I admire a great deal. Our conversation was written up as an interview for Rain Taxi Magazine and has just been released in their Winter 2008/2009 online issue.
KS: I get the sense that, in that house, you were raised with the idea that reading was a tactile, lustful activity.
AF: Oh yes, lustful to the core! My father thought
books were meant to be handled. He dog-eared the pages and wrote in the
margins. After our parents died and my brother and I inherited their
library, it was like hearing a voice from the other side to read the
notes our father had written next to passages he particularly liked.
My parents were both professional writers, but they also did a ton
of reading for pleasure. My father was a judge for the
Book-of-the-Month Club for 60 years. And while I’m sure many people
thought of that as a form of selling out, he was sometimes able to
identify a great book like Catcher in the Rye or And the Band Played On
before it was published, and to help it gain the success it deserved.
He wasn’t a snob. He got just as excited about a good thriller or sci
fi novel as about a literary biography.
Many people are still excited by reading. So I don’t count myself
among those who think that literature is dying in the United States.
Your own book [Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times] is
encouraging—it shows that there are young people out there who will
take literature in new directions that I can’t even guess at, many of
them Internet-based. This may not be the sort of thing that I would
write myself, maybe not even read myself. But it’s going to be vital,
it’s going to be exciting.