Anne Fadiman is an author, essayist, journalist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader; At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays; and, most recently, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir about her father, the writer Clifton Fadiman. She is the editor of The Best American Essays 2003 and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, and for seven years was the editor of The American Scholar. Currently, Fadiman is the inaugural Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale, where she teaches in the English department and serves as a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.

EB: How did you begin writing in general and nonfiction specifically?

AF: I started writing as a small child. In the second grade I wrote a novella about a family of wild dogs. The plot revolved around an alligator that was mistaken for a log and took one of the puppies on an unanticipated voyage through the Everglades.

Sometime between then and the end of college I apparently lost my imagination. Although I took two fiction classes in college, my short stories were awful. I recognized that the column I wrote for the college alumni magazine was more up my alley. That meant no more fictional alligators, though I wouldn’t mind writing about a real alligator.

EB: I know that you originally worked as a journalist before moving into essays and memoir. Is your writing process different for something that is journalistic versus something that is essayistic versus something that is memoir? For example, how was the process of writing The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down different from writing Ex Libris, and how was writing Ex Libris different from writing The Wine Lover’s Daughter?

AF: I’m not sure the process of writing my four books has been very different, but the process of preparing to write them has been.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was a reported work about a Hmong family’s conflicts with the American medical system. Before I set pen to paper (I don’t mean that figuratively; my early chapters were written in pen on yellow legal pads), I spent months reporting and more than a year reading, then at least a year organizing my material.

I wrote my first essay collection, Ex Libris, while I was confined to bed during a problem pregnancy. No reporting, only a little reading. I was upright and mobile when I did my second essay collection, At Large and At Small, so I did a lot more reading. For both those collections, I made lots of notes and outlines before starting to write—though the preparatory phases were small potatoes compared with Spirit.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter combined all of the above, aside from the horizontal pregnancy. I did some reporting (talking with people who’d known my father and people who knew about wine; learning about taste science in order to find out if my own indifference to wine could be biological); lots of reading, including my father’s essays, letters, and journals; lots and lots of notes and outlines.

I’ve pretty much thought things out by the time I start to write, so that whatever the genre, from that point on it can be all about the sentences. I write and rewrite. I read my work aloud to listen to the rhythm.

EB: Let’s talk more about your most recent book, The Wine Lover’s Daughter. As you said, it’s a memoir about your father, and I was so impressed by how you painted such a nuanced portrait of him. You showed extreme love for him, but you didn’t gloss over his flaws and you showed that he was a full, complicated person. How do you approach writing about people you care about, both alive and dead?

AF: I’m not sure I have a particular approach. I do feel it isn’t worth writing about anyone, especially someone in your family, if you omit the tough stuff.

EB: Good point.

AF: In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, I wrote about my father’s class-related insecurity, his fervent desire not to be Jewish, his sexism, and his infidelity. The purpose of the book was to help readers really get to know my father and feel they understood them. What would be the point of talking only about his good qualities? I tell my students not to be afraid to spill a drop of blood here and there. I could never ask them to do something I was unwilling to do myself.

EB: That’s fair. I love the idea of spilling a drop of blood—though that can be difficult. In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

AF: Knowing you can’t make anything up. Even if reality gives you something vaguer or more complicated than might be ideal for your narrative, you’re stuck with it.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

AF: Knowing you can’t make anything up. Although it’s constraining, it’s also liberating. You need to be confident that reality will give you what you need, and that if at first blush it doesn’t seem like what you need, writing about it vividly, accurately, and authentically will make it so.

EB: That’s so true. Knowing you can’t make anything up is the best and worst part of nonfiction writing, for sure.

Now, on a different and slightly embarrassing note, when I was cleaning out a closet in my apartment recently I rediscovered two fan letters I wrote you in 2001 when I was thirteen years old and obsessed with Ex Libris.

You wrote me a lovely response, which clearly meant a lot to me, as I saved it in a box in my closet for seventeen years. Perhaps the thing I love the most about nonfiction is how it can connect people through their stories and make you realize you are not alone in the way you think or feel. What do you think is the most important or powerful aspect of writing nonfiction, especially essay and memoir?

AF: I don’t know about the “most important or powerful aspect” part, but it was great fun to reread that correspondence. You were a delightful thirteen-year-old. By the way, it looks as if I didn’t answer your second letter—and if that’s the case, let me retroactively apologize.

EB: Oh, no need to apologize. You clearly said email was a better way to get in touch with you and I completely ignored that request, as I was infatuated with using a fountain pen to write at the time.

AF: You sounded a lot the way I did at thirteen.

EB: Well, that’s an honor. Thank you. Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a woman writer?

AF: Here’s the end of Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth”:

I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Woolf is in her study, watching a small moth. Earlier in the essay, the moth flew vigorously, then fluttered more feebly, then fell on its back. She tried to turn it right side up with her pencil, but to no avail. Finally, here, the moth dies.

This passage moves me for several reasons. First, I’m interested in the subject. I once wrote an essay (in At Large and At Small) about how I collected butterflies as a child until it dawned on me that I was committing murder. When Woolf herself was a child, she and her siblings attracted moths by hanging rags smeared with treacle and rum from trees. Second, it’s beautifully written. Woolf couldn’t save the moth’s life by lifting her pencil, but when she lifted her pencil to the page, she made him immortal. Third, it’s a poignant window into Woolf’s psyche. By the time she wrote this passage, she was no longer interested in killing moths; she wanted this moth to live, but it didn’t because it couldn’t. She committed suicide not long after she wrote the essay. She also wrote a suicide note—to her husband, Leonard—but I think of this as a suicide note too. I wanted to live, she is saying. I tried really, really hard. But death was stronger than I was.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.