Anne Fadiman is mildly disappointed that I’ve only brought the galleys of At Large and At Small, her new essay collection, to our lunch date; now she can’t bring out the lovely endpapers, thematically linked to the opening essay on butterfly collecting. But no matter; we’re having plenty of fun catching up on the decade since our first interview. Since the publication of her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Fadiman has published a previous collection of essays, Ex Libris; just as that book drew upon her writing for Civilization, this new volume is, with the exception of a single New Yorker feature, a compilation of familiar essays—a little more scholarly than memoir; a little more personal than academia—written for The American Scholar, the literary quarterly she edited for seven years.
Given the unfortunate nature of her forced departure from the Scholar after a budgetary dispute with the magazine’s backers, I wondered if the book might provoke a bittersweet reaction, but she adamantly refused that interpretation. “When I see this book on the shelf, my memories are entirely joyful,” she emphasized. “Putting together the book was a way to restore my happiest memories of those years,” particularly the memories of working with editorial colleagues such as Jean Stipicevic, Sandra Costich, and John Bethell. The compilation was, perhaps, made easier by the fact that she always envisioned a book like At Large… even before the first essay was complete. “I wanted these essays to seem like members of the same family,” she recalls, “cousins if not siblings,” and the idea that someday some reader would be experiencing them as a whole was a significant influence on their arrangement, right down to the shifting balance between the intellectual and the personal from one chapter to the next. Now that it’s done, she’s in the middle of a three-year stint as a writer-in-residence at Yale, commuting from her home in western Massachusetts each week while her husband, George Howe Colt, works on his next book.
And beyond that? We joke about her penchant for late nights and ice cream (both subjects she treats at length in the book), and then she says she loves teaching, but she always wants to make room for the familiar essay in her life. “There’s so many good reporters around; the world of reportage doesn’t need me to stay healthy,” she reflects. “The essay is not in danger of expiring, but it’s not exactly robust, either—it needs all the help it can get.” She’s quick to cite other essayists she admires, many of whom she worked with during her time at the Scholar—Nicholson Baker, Thomas Mallon, Cynthia Ozick—but anyone who’s read Fadiman’s work knows that she’s more than welcome in their illustrious company.