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The Prose Whisperer
A writer’s writer turns mentor to Yale undergraduates.
May/June 2010
by Jake Halpern ’97
Jake Halpern ’97 is the
author of Fame
Junkies and coauthor of Dormia, a fantasy for young adults.
A student, whom we will
call Amy Smith, stands behind her chair in a small classroom in
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, holding two pages of paper. Her hands seem unsteady.
Perhaps this is because she is about to reveal to the dozen or so other
students in this class that she has bipolar disorder. Intimate confessions of
this nature are not unusual in this particular seminar, Writing about Oneself,
taught by the renowned nonfiction writer Anne Fadiman. Fadiman always insists
that her students read aloud. “I want them to feel that their words are
important,” she says.
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“Did it feel like a relief, or was it just really horrible to write it?”
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Smith reads her essay
quietly, but with great feeling. The first paragraph states her diagnosis so simply
that it seems almost an aside. The essay is beautifully written, in stark but
elegant prose. It describes, among other things, the moment in Smith’s
childhood when she realized her father was mentally ill: “When I was six, I
went to the kitchen expecting breakfast and found my father frying Sesame Street videotapes in the cast-iron skillet. The charred
plastic littered the kitchen for days; the smoke stained the walls for the
whole summer, until my father was released from his month-long stay in the hospital
and repainted the entire house as penance. He also mended the holes he’d made
in the walls and bought a new couch to replace the one he’d gutted with a
butcher knife one night while we were sleeping.”
When Smith has finished
reading, silence pervades the classroom. Then Fadiman says that she likes the
piece very much, genuinely admires it. She has several suggestions—gently
encouraging Smith, for instance, to include more on her father’s violent
tendencies. “When you talk about his thick hands and stinging words we don’t
know whether the hands were actually used to hurt anyone,” says Fadiman; the
key, she adds, is to say so “matter-of-factly.”
Another student
cautiously dissents: “I thought the mention of him cutting up the sofa,
though—for me—was all the violence I needed.”
Fadiman considers this.
It must be odd for a woman who has edited the likes of Cynthia Ozick and
Stephen Jay Gould, and who has been a National Magazine Award finalist six
times as a writer and twelve times as an editor, to be contradicted by an
undergraduate. But she merely nods her head appreciatively. Fadiman goes on to
tell Smith that she also wants more specific examples of Smith herself “being
manic or depressed.” This will provide balance: “Then we would feel that you
weren’t revealing things about your father that you were unwilling to reveal
about yourself.”
Finally, Fadiman asks: “Did it feel like a relief, or was it just really horrible to write it?”
Smith says it was
indeed a relief to write and share the piece—“although it’s very odd to me. You
guys know this, and no one in my family except my mother knows. This isn’t bad.
I guess it’s good for me. But it was a profoundly strange and cathartic
experience.”
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For Fadiman, “courage and good writing aren’t the same thing.”
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Writing about Oneself
(the course) can be cathartic because writing about oneself (the act) can be
cathartic. The self-revelations aren’t usually as dramatic as the one in the
essay Amy Smith read in spring 2009. But Paul Needham ’11, who wrote one of his
essays on a friend’s suicide, says some students joke that the course is like
therapy.
But students have
written about topics as varied and non-therapeutic as cutting wood, making pie,
learning classical Greek, driving one hundred miles an hour, and falling in
love with a photograph of Virginia Woolf. To Fadiman, catharsis isn’t the
point. She admires the bravery of a student like Amy Smith. But “courage and
good writing aren’t the same thing,” Fadiman says.
In an e-mail, she
elaborated: “When I read the applications and writing samples, I never choose
someone who has had an interesting life—that is, who obviously has ‘something
to write about’—over someone who can write a beautiful sentence. The most
important thing I’m looking for is a graceful relationship with the English
language.”
Fadiman has been
teaching that graceful relationship at Yale since January 2005—Writing about
Oneself every spring and Advanced Nonfiction Writing every fall. Both seminars
are extremely popular, especially the personal essay course: a hundred students
apply every year for a dozen slots. (The numbers have “nothing to do with me as
a teacher,” Fadiman insists. “It’s the subject that exercises a magnetic
effect.”)
Each class meets for
two and a half hours. The workshop session, in which students read their work
aloud for critique, takes only 30 minutes. The rest of the time is spent
analyzing the week’s reading assignments. The nonfiction students read
contemporary American authors, including Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Henry
Louis Gates Jr. ’73. The personal essay students read first-person pieces
spanning two centuries—one old and one new every week.
On the day Amy Smith
read her piece, the theme was Family, and the readings were James Thurber’s
“The Night the Bed Fell” and Dave Eggers’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The theme of the discussion was less Family than How
They Did It: how Thurber used standard humor techniques from dramatic irony to
well-placed funny words, and how Eggers turned the idea of memoir on its head
by constantly questioning his own motives for writing one. Through such
discussions, Fadiman teaches craft. On the first page of the Writing about
Oneself syllabus, she declares, “I believe it is impossible to write well
without learning how to read well.”
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Every week she meets one-on-one with half her class—six students—for an hour each.
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Fadiman commutes to
Yale from western Massachusetts, where she lives with her teenage son and her
husband, George Howe Colt, also a nonfiction writer. Colt and Fadiman meet the
challenges of the two-writer household with a rotating employment system. One
writes a book while the other holds down a job with a steady paycheck and health
insurance, and then they switch off. The employed half of the couple also
serves as in-house editor for the writing half. Fadiman edited Colt’s most
recent book, The
Big House, which was a finalist for
the National Book Award.
As the Francis
Writer-in-Residence of Yale College, Fadiman also lives in Branford College at
least one night a week. The arrangement keeps her close to the pulse of student
life, she says. “Whether it’s the smell of the secondhand marijuana smoke under
the door, or the sound of the rock music at three in the morning, or the sight
of the people lurching home in an alcoholic stupor—it definitely brings me back
to my college years. I’m right in the thick of it.”
She also has an office
in Branford, crammed with five chairs, a couch, a desk, an end table, two
bookcases, a Persian-style carpet, a quilt on the wall, copious books, and
countless papers. It looks almost as if someone had packed up a tastefully
furnished living room, put everything in a very small spare bedroom, and then
decided to call that spare bedroom an office. Here Fadiman holds her workaholic
office hours. Every week she meets one-on-one with half her class—six
students—for an hour each. In these sessions, she sits at her computer with the
student at her side, and they go through the student’s essay, line by line.
“Oh, it’s lunatic,” she admits, “but I never can do anything by halves.”
When Fadiman met with
Rebecca Dinerstein ’09 to discuss her essay on being an exceptionally picky
eater, the session began with Fadiman on the couch and Dinerstein in a chair.
(This is standard practice for the first half hour, one student told me, “so
that it doesn’t feel like you are at a therapist’s. Because if you were on the
couch it would be too weird.”) Fadiman was dressed casually, in an earth-toned
shirt and pants; unlike most female literati, she doesn’t dye her hair or wear
ostentatiously bohemian reading glasses. “Did you survive tap night—not too
hung over?” Fadiman asked, and they chatted for a few minutes. The conversation
soon morphed into a broader discussion about Dinerstein’s writing aspirations,
and then turned to her essay. After half an hour, almost to the minute, Fadiman
asked Dinerstein to join her at her desk, and they went over every line in the
piece, analyzing its grammar, tone, fluidity, and originality.
The process can be
painstakingly slow. Early in the semester, these dissections rarely make it
past the first paragraph. But the reviewing goes faster as students start
finding the problems themselves.
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Fadiman almost seems to revel in the role of the sentence-parsing New England schoolmarm.
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One might think a
writer as accomplished as Fadiman—three books, scores of published articles,
several awards—would have little interest in teaching the craft of writing to
undergraduates, down to the fundamentals of grammar, year after year. Precisely
the opposite is true. She almost seems to revel in the role of the
sentence-parsing New England schoolmarm, pushing every student to master the
difference between a restrictive and a nonrestrictive clause. “Anne cares
equally about the emotional parts of being a good essayist, like not lying your
way towards a tidy conclusion, and about the technical parts, like studying the
canon or mastering the semicolon,” says a former student, Sarah Stillman ’06.
Still, after five
years, is it nearly time for Fadiman to switch jobs with her husband and turn
out another book? I asked whether, in her time at Yale, she has ever felt
anxious to get back to writing. “Never, never, never, never,” she replied,
explaining that she has much to learn as a teacher, whereas her learning curve
as a writer has “kind of flattened.” That sounded surprisingly pessimistic,
until she elaborated: “I think it flattened out at a fairly high level, so
that’s not exactly a disappointment.”
Having achieved that
peak, Fadiman has the luxury of teaching. “When I’m 80, I don’t want to look
back on my life and just picture myself sitting alone at a computer,” she said.
“There’s a lot more to the world than writing.”  |
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