The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Speaker: Anne Fadiman, Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University

This presentation will focus on how Fadiman gathered the material for her account of the crosscultural conflicts between a family of Hmong refugees and the doctors who cared for their epileptic daughter at a county hospital in California’s Central Valley. She will discuss the main themes of the book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and how she reached them: a process very different from the one she might have followed had she been an ethnographer rather than a journalist.